I enabled comments on my blog. Soon I'll have to deal with comment spam with pyblosxom.

I just submitted my abstract for a GUADEC 2005 paper. I may regret this later, but it will provide incentive for me to make Glom useful. Also, I'd like a better project name.

Glom – Saying “F*** You” to database administrators

Abstract:
Glom (http://www.glom.org) is a simple system for creating useful database
applications, for people who don't give a damn what SQL is. It allows you
to design (and redesign) database tables, the relationships between
tables, and the user interface for those tables. It makes the important
things easy. Therefore, it is not an Access clone.

The talk will present the fundamental concepts used in Glom, and the
current status of this (unfinished) ongoing project. I will mention how
difficult these things are with existing systems. Depending on my mood,
this may result in an offensive amount of crude, and occasionally
creative, swearing.

Bio:
Murray Cumming is a freelance software developer, based in Munich. You may
have seen him in other projects such as gtkmm.

A non-techy friend recently found herself with Ubuntu Linux instead of Windows on her laptop. She seemed mostly not panicked by this, but did mention that “it” was slower than it had been with Windows. Upon investigation, it turns out that it's the long OpenOffice startup time that gave this impression. Sounds reasonable. I wonder what's happening with that.

I’ll be in Venice for a few days over New Year’s. I’m really looking forward to wandering around there. My advent calendar helps to count the days.

I've released a couple more Glom versions recently. The one that I released a few months ago turned out to be quite broken, even though it was meant to be a fairly stable working version to leave out there while I was busy on other things. Hopefully the bugs will stop coming back.

Glom is now even simpler, and it can create example databases, though I have not made an interesting example yet. This should show it off a bit more and help me to spot some regressions.

I'm looking forward to implementing new Glom features next year. I feel very confident about it.

I imagine that people find the huge polpyaudio and libgnomesu threads on GNOME's desktop-devel-list a bit daunting, but I think they are wonderful. People are clarifying user and technical requirements, and taking us closer to more things just working.

My current paid-work project will be cancelled at the end of the month, so I'll have more time for Glom in January.

Lots of mistakes have been made during this project, but nothing else has hurt us so much as ClearCase. Every other problem could have been overcome if it hadn't been for ClearCase at the bottom of our dependency tree. This could not be more obvious.

Microsoft Visual C plus plus .Net2003 seems to have a dynamic_cast bug that's very similar (but not 100%) to one that gcc 2.95 had a couple of years ago. It means that Visual C plus plus won't be able to use gtkmm, though of course we welcome patches.

Last night I met Fer for a couple of beers in Berlin. He's here to see Tom Waits live, the lucky bastard. I learned that both Fer and Carlos g-s-t Garnacho are now working on Linux stuff at Tecsidel in Madrid.