At approximately UTC 13:00 on Wednesday, GNOME 2.8.0 will be released, when Jeff hits the big release button in Sydney. Then we can spend the day reading glowing reviews and enjoying the adoration of slashdotters, and wondering what’s next in GNOME 2.10.

And on Wednesday evening, some of us will be celebrating the birth of GNOME 2.8 (and the secret yllari project) in Berlin. Well, Frank and I will be, and danielk if I can track him down. GNOME hackers and users in Berlin are very welcome to join us at Dos Piranhas at Yorckstraße 81, at approx. 19:00. For people who are trying to find us, I look like this:

and Frank looks like this:

Neither of us can do anything about that.

The GNOME release team are receiving a small avalanche of hard code freeze break requests. Maybe people can inately sense that the 2.8 release cycle is two weeks shorter than normal.

This stage in the release cycle usually scares me senseless. We have to weigh up a) fixing fairly serious bugs, with b) the risk of introducing worse bugs by accident. Fixers for crashes almost always get accepted. The number of serious bugs that are being fixed at the last moment reinforces my suspicion that GNOME 2.7/2.8 has not been tested as much as normal.

This time we have lots of Evolution patches to look at as well. The Evolution team at Novell/Ximian are doing a great job of adapting to the GNOME release process along with the tough in-house procedures that they seem to follow already. It can't be nice for them to have to ask people like me for permission to apply patches, but I'm glad that they already know how to make software stable.

Anyway, yadda yadda, GNOME 2.8 is on schedule for September 15th. GNOME says they are going to do it, and then they do it. People like that.

Until I tried this in Internet Explorer, I thought that this worldwide US presidential election thing was maybe a Florida-related satire.

John, I know, but national polls of the
popular vote are used as a innacurate measure of
what might be happening in all the swing states, particularly if the samples are selected to be somehow representative of the country. Obviously they are not much good for that, but there are probably more of them than state polls, and they probably have more consistent methodologies, so it's not surprising that people use them that way.

The electoral vote projections are all over the place as well. I'd like to see a poll to find out how many registered voters know the difference.

I’m back in Berlin after taking holiday in the UK, in London, North Berwick, and Edinburgh.

We didn’t actually spend enough time in Edinburgh and got picky about what shows to see – things seem less worthwhile when they give you free tickets, but did see one wonderful physical/dance thing – Rumble, by a German outfit, actually with some German dialog. It was a hip hop Romeo and Juliet, but far better than you’d expect from that formula and the dodgy name. It was properly choreographed, with humour and appropriate use of music and projections. I really liked that the styles had been fully europeanised. I grinned lots.

I don't think GNOME 2.7/2.8 is getting the testing that 2.5/2.6 got, and that was a scary release cycle. So I don't plan to approve many freeze breaks unless they fix really serious problems.

I haven't been testing it myself recently. I still haven't tried the new MIME type stuff, for instance. Don't assume that it's just your system – make a fuss if there's any problems with important stuff like that.

munichblogs.com and berlinblogs.com have gone blank. It's a planet problem that's been mentioned before. I should have DSL in Berlin today so I can investigate this evening. However, I also have to translate the GNOME Deutschland constitution into English for Tim Ney before I go on holiday, so time is limited. I hate having just evenings free for worthwhile stuff.

On Friday morning (the 20th) I fly to London, then I fly to Edinburgh (North Berwick plus Edinburgh festival) on the evening of the 21st, back in London on the morning of the 25th, and back in Berlin on the evening of the 26th. It's all holiday, so feel free to email/phone me if you want to try to meet.

I just noticed that an eclipse-3-compatible version of the CDT (C Development Tools) was released a month or so ago. Hopefully I can get that onto Debian somehow. This comment from RedHat is good news: Working CDT 2.0 into next product release schedule for August 2004. I currently use one of the other awful IDEs, and obviously I'd like one that is not awful.

Apparently the new Hartz reforms in Germany are going to make life excessively difficult for a lot of unemployed people, but there's clearly something that needs fixing.

For example, unemployed people receive a percentage of the money that they got when they were employed. So an unemployed bank manager gets more than an unemployed laborer. That seems deeply unfair.

Also, there's someone who I would very much like to employ for a few days a month, so he'd receive a few hundred euros. But if he takes that job then he a) gets less than when he's unemployed, instead of it being topped up, and b) When I stop employing him he'll get less than before, because his new previous job paid less. So the system stops me from helping to support an unemployed person, and stops my business from benefiting from his skills/effort.

Honestly, I am a socialist, even if it doesn't sound like it. Most people would prefer to be productive even if they get less for it. It's just that the German system really does seem to be unsustainable. Hopefully a compromise will make things better.

I found an internet cafe around the corner where I can use my laptop, so I was able to upload new versions of glom, gtkmm, glibmm, and gnome-vfsmm. Kreuzberg has 3rd-World internet cafe prices – 1 euro per hour. In a couple of weeks I should have a DSL connection here too.

On saturday I met Daniel Elstner and Frank Rehberger for Indian food and drinks in Kreuzberg and Friedrichshain, and on Sunday I visited one of the many artificial beach bars (the in thing) in Berlin for a late breakfast, with Frank and some of his family and friends.