This is a terrible week for internet connectivity in Linz. For the last few weeks the company rented a room in the university building down the street so I could walk down there with my laptop and use their unproxied connection. But that isn't available anymore. I might start knocking on doors in the students' building and offer them euros for the use of their network sockets.

So this week will be an experiment showing how much I can achieve just by sending emails.

I found LinzNet who seem to offer a better, simpler, ADSL than Austrian Telekom. Has anyone used them?

This is the Hauptplatz in Linz. I like it, but I don't know why. My new apartment is nearby.

easy-fix

aldug has now added an easy-fix column to our GNOME bugzilla reports, showing bugs with the easy-fix keyword. In combination with the column showing the number of outstanding patches, I think this is the single best way to involve new people and to reinvolve existing people. But maintainers must use it.

gtkmm

Cedric Gustin finished the changes necessary to make gtkmm 2.2 build on Windows. Even better, he created a Windows installer for it, like the one for GTK+. Soon he should have a version that installs an example too. That should be very persuasive. People often list Qt's cross-platform ability as an important feature so I like to show that gtkmm can do it too.

libsigc++

Martin Schulze and Andreas Rottmann are doing great work on the unstable libsigc++ 2. We should have a first tarball release soon.

And Dr Dobbs magazine had a nice article recently about the 1.2 API, comparinng it favourably to C#'s equivalent.

ClearQuest

I started using ClearQuest yesterday and, surprise, surprise, it is a disaster, just like ClearCase. Eventually people must learn that software that's so expensive that only a few people use it is invitably awful. People get a certain confidence from paying vast amounts for proprietary software, but that confidence never lasts more than a few days after the installation. I keep seeing the same situation over and over again. The future can only be better.

The whole idea of a bug-tracker which only allows (some) developers to enter bugs is silly.