gtkmm 2.5.1 is out, with lots of new API. I think people will be particularly glad to see the combo and progressbar CellRenderers. The GTK developers have achieved far more in GTK 2.5 than I had a right to expect.

There's an Orkut-like website in Germany called openBC. I think it's meant to help you to make business contacts, but this is not how business contacts work best. For instance,

• I'll not be impressed with a cold call just because the callers says that he's a friend of a friend.
• I'll be annoyed when somebody uses my name to make a contact, without me actually recommending the person.
• I'm pretty sure that some people are just using it to harvest the names of companies that outsource to freelancers. That gets annyoying fast.

So, unless, for instance, you sell life insurance or are a recruiter, I think you are on the losing end of the deal.

Worst of all, after a couple of weeks you have to pay just to see peoples' names, so I doubt the business sense of people who use it instead of Orkut. It's particularly silly if you are in the open source business.

The CSU government in Bavaria just decided to ban muslim headscarves in schools. Meanwhile, schools in Bavaria are required to display crufixes (the nasty body on the cross ones) in every classroom, even in schools where the majority of students are muslim. This is not a place I would like to send my kids to school.

It looks like gstreamer-based audio (Rhythmbox) and video (Totem) players will be installed by default on all major Linux distros some time soon, but they won't play proprietary stuff like MP3 and DVD. If a company like Fluendo made it really easy (download then double-click) to install these codecs on all major distros then I would happily pay something for it. Hopefully I would be able to pay once for the right to download the codec for any distro, with free upates (for future versions of my distro) for 3 years.

I'm posting this from Ubuntu, which I'm trying via the LiveCD. It's a far better example of Linux than Knoppix, without techy distractions.

Apparently Ubuntu will do regular LiveCDs, not just for major releases. I hope that this happens and I think that we should link to them when we announce GNOME development releases. As well as being easier to install, it would be a very controlled testing environment that would be more likely to identify major problems unambiguously. Of course I'd like to see other distros offer this too.

My only negative impressions are superficial and easily fixable:

• Most applications are not using startup notification (the watch cursor), so it looks like things aren't working for a few seconds.
• The menu panel has no “Window Selector” drop-down. Instead, it uses the big horizontal “Window List” on the bottom panel. I guess this is more familiar to Windows users, but it doesn't work on Windows and it doesn't work in GNOME.
• I don't think it's easy to distinguish the brown frames on a dark-brown background. And I'd prefer if the Industrial theme half-shaded the frame titles on non-focused windows.

I still see no debian release schedule, time-based or otherwise.

Today's appalling ClearCase discovery is that teams working on one project from different sites must each have their own branches, and must constantly merge the changes from the other sites' branches into their own. Taken to its logical extreme, that would mean that, if a project such as GNOME used ClearCase, we would need hundreds of branches. Add to this that branching itself is incredibly broken and difficult in ClearCase, and that ClearCase is I-wonder-if-it-has-crashed slow.

ClearCase's sole purpose is to make my life difficult. The company could save vast amounts of money by using cvs/subversion/etc and employing an unskilled worker to kick me repeatedly in the balls. They'd get the same effect, with the adding bonus of occasionally developing some software.

I try to stop myself ranting about ClearCase, because the rest of the world obviously doesn't care, because the rest of the world is obviously not insane enough to be using it. But every day ClearCase makes the case against itself so powerfully that I have to vent now and then. This page is a kind of support group.

I still haven't found an acceptable German web hoster. Last time I mentioned this I got a few suggestions, but none that actually offer ssh login and cron jobs at a sensible price. People suggested Manitu (no cron jobs), and Domainfactory.de. I found a few more hosters that seemed to be suitable but many seem to be one-man operations. I am disappointed.

The best suggestion, Domainfactory.de, offers a full enough service, but costs 39.90 Euros per month, compared to Dreamhost who cost $7.95 of those mini-dollars. I might just stick with the yanks.

At the weekend I was at the Sophie Calle retrospective at the Martin-Gropius-Bau. She was blogging before the web existed. Now you don't need a museum to share the fascinatingly mundane details of life. The poster is all over the town.

By the way, the Cinestar Wahlparty was a disappointment. I got there at about 1:30am, and had to wait outside for half an hour at the back of a small crowd, for no apparent reason. When we finally got inside there were another couple of hundred people there, but there was only one badly-placed semi-large screen in a hallway, often with no sound, and standing-room only. Food was rubbish and insanely overpriced. I left after half an hour so that I could actually watch the election at home on dull BBC World.

I used one of the DB Call-a-bike bicycles to get home, because transport is difficult at that time of night. They are sturdy slightly-bouncy things.

On the language-bindings mailing list, James pointed out this really useful list of new functions in GTK 2.5/2.6.

I have dealt with most of these in gtkmm 2.5, but I'm waiting for a GTK tarball release before I can release it.