I need a decent German web site hoster for some of my sites. One that's Linuxy and lets me do Linuxy things. Bytecamp does not seem to be that, though to their credit they do offer free hosting to open-source developers (I'm paying though, so I get to criticise). They only allow access via ftp (so I can't ssh/rsync my stuff onto the site) and don't allow cron jobs (needed for blog planets).

I'd like something like the service I get from Dreamhost, who are based in the U.S. Their basic package is cheap yet hosts 3 domains, with ssh access, cron jobs, mailing-lists, POP and SMTP access, MySQL, full cgi, and generous storage and bandwidth. Sign up via that link if you are interested – it makes a big contribution to my hosting bill. And email me if you know of something similar in Germany or Euroland.

It looks like Martin Schulze will have libsigc 2.0 working with the SUN Forte compiler soon. That will allow gtkmm 2.4 to work with that compiler too. It has worked fine with gtkmm 2.0 and 2.2 for a while. As well as being a great signal/slot API, libsigc 2.0 is a hell of a C compiler test suite. It's a good thing we have gcc.

Damien Carbery at SUN has been _really_ helpful and patient with this. He must have tested at least 10 tarballs by now. As usual Martin Schulze is doing a great job of maintaining libsigc , and solving the more difficult problems.

SUN have offerered GNOME a SUN Box plus Forte compiler, but I don't think the GNOME sysadmins have figured out where to host it yet.

Update: I guess weblog-add.py does not like plus symbols in posts. You get to guess where they are missing.

I saw Fahrenheit 9/11 a couple of days ago. If you read newspapers regularly then it doesn't contain much that's new, but it does package things up nicely for the average undecided voter. I think it actually tries to mention too many details, probably so it doesn't all look like unfounded insinuation. But a film is not the place for detalied citation of research and references. It looks like House of Bush, House of Saud contains more appropriate back-up material.

On one hand, it's a bit silly to focus on how corrupt one set of politicians are. All mainstream politicians (particularly the Republicans and Democrats in America) are terribly corrupt, with all kinds of conflicts of interests. But the Bush administration is an order of magnitude more corrupt so it's really worth taking the shots at this easy target.

Ralph Nader wanted Bush to win so it would show some real differences between the 2 parties, stimulate debate, and force them to take some principled positions. I think he was a bit too successful, and rather than wait for electoral reform, I'd prefer to see the slightly-less-corrupt party in power than the totally-corrupt-party. Otherwise the U.S. is going to break down completely. The framers of the constitution did not foresee this.

Before I saw the film I had been worried about the mention of the Bin Laden being flown out of the U.S. without following proper procedures. Though they are not exactly working class heroes, it sounded like a racist and insubstantial claim that those members of the Bin Laden family were somehow guilty by association, though they mostly disowned Osama years ago. So, I was glad that the film does not make this accusation and really just uses the incident to show the incredible influence that the Saudis have within the Bush administration.

The focus on the suffering of U.S. troops is a middle-America vote-winner but it's kind of distasteful. I guess the undecided voters are not ready to consider that the deaths of tens of thousands of Iraqis civilians are just as tragic as a those of a thousand U.S. soldiers.

It's not a great documentary or work of art, but it tells Americans some of the things they need to know, in the crude way they want to hear it. People have called it propaganda, and it's certainly like an extended campaign advert. But I don't think it's comparable to the classic WW2 propaganda of Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, and the Allies. Those were about demonizing whole cultures and races of people, instilling mortal fear of them and encouraging violence against them. Farenheit 9/11 does not do that, though the Bush administration arguably used those techniques to justify the Iraq war.

From what I read of the John Kerry nomination speach, he seems to have summarised many of the same points, probably for the same reasons. People don't like being lied to, and tend to hold the grudge when voting.

I'm not a U.S. citizen, but this election will have a massive influence on the whole world, for the rest of our lives.

Sorry for the rant.

Testing weblog-add.py so I can create pyblosxom entries through the silly firewall.

I'll be working in Berlin for the next six months or so, starting Monday, getting back to Munich as often as possible. This is awkward, but makes some other things possible.

Even more than usual, this means that people need to help themselves with my various open-source projects. Patches will be reviewed and committed, and test cases will be pondered during 6 hour train journeys.

I think that the GNOME 2.7/2.8 API/ABI freeze is on Monday, so I'm trying to wrap the extra gnome-vfs DNS-SD and resolve API for gnome-vfsmm.

I released another version of glom today, which adds some signifcant new functionality and fixes a lot of bugs that had worried me. I've been doing releases almost every week because I find that helps me to focus on adding features and then bugfixing them, rather than just hacking at random. I'll probably slow down though, because I feel I've achieved enough for now. I know what needs to be done next, and I know I can do it when I feel like it. Also, I won't get much feedback until it can be packaged widely, and that can't happen for a few months yet. It's been very enjoyable to develop something with a clear idea of what I want, and without pressure.

The next big tasks are:

• Make the Details layout a set of heirarchical multi-column groups, so that groups of fields can span all columns, and to allow lists of related fields to be shown among the regular fields.
• Derive a custom TreeModel that gets clumps of data from the database just-in-time.
• Allow constantly-updated calculations with Python.
• Think up some way to define print layouts, with headers and footers and repeating sections, and groups and summaries.

Today has been quite successful. So that field values can be calculated from other fields, I have embedded the Python interpreter into Glom. This should give people a lot of freedom to play with their data, and to get special information such as the current date/time. I might even use it for scripting, like in Filemaker, so that people can put buttons on their layouts to make stuff happen. And people could use pygtk to interact with the user.

John Ehresman on the #pygtk irc channel was very helpful with this.

I also need to provide the field values to the python environment, so that the script has some data to work with, but that looks quite straightforward.