I am genuinely surprised at how thoroughly the Democrats have lost. I really thought there was a chance for a substantial moderate vote and a return to peace and sanity.

This time America has actually voted for an extremist religious and ideological administration, and it's the extremism that got voters to the polls. And this despite a very large minority who recognise that as madness. These crazies now have a clear mandate and unchallenged control of all branches of government. As if it wasn't bad enough that torture, imprisonment without trial and institutional discrimination have become acceptable, and that criticism can routinely be labelled as treason, now we get to see whether things can actually get worse. Things are bad when the best thing you can say about the president is that he's not actually as bad as fascistdictatorofyourchoice.

The position of “beacon of democracy and freedom” is now open for new applications.

Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe they won't use the power that they now have. Maybe the christian-right won't call in its favours. Maybe Rumsfeld will be fired now. But if they didn't hold back before, why would they now?

The new glibmm 2.5.1 now has a mature version of the command-line-argument-parsing API, wrapping the GOption API in glib. I've been a bit rushed, so now would be be a good time to check it. Or regret it later when you try to use it. Here is an example.

There are some good articles in the Economist this week about usability and simplicity of user interfaces. I like the automobile analogy, in which they point out that cars were once so complex that you had to employ a driver/mechanic – equivalent to today's computer support techie. I often find it depressing that we still have to point out this same old obvious stuff, 20 years after the Mac appeared. But some things make me believe that things are going to get better.

• Mobile phones were always too difficult to use and they are now gaining a shitloads of new features, vastly compounded the problem. Their manufacturers are clueless – they do almost no user interface design or testing. Desktop computers have been so unusable for so long that people think that's normal, but they won't be forced to accept that on their mobile phones. Because there is actually competition (no monopoly) in the mobile phone market, the best will win.
• GNOME just works.

Today Andrew “MINIX” Tannenbaum, revealed himself as the guy behind the electoral-vote.com site that I check everyday. Nifty.

N24 has more information about the Sony-Center Wahlparty tomorrow. It looks like it might actually be a big-screen outdoors thing like they had for the world cup. That could get pretty cold in the middle of the night. Mal sehen. E-mail me if you want to meet there [1].

[1] Unless, of course, you're some freak who's voting for a commander-in-chief rather than a president, believes the earth is six thousand years old, and believes that same-sex marriage is the first step in a UN conspiracy intent on forcing you to become a gay french muslim. Or any variation thereof.

I think I'll run for election to the Board this time. I'd like to make a difference. Hopefully we'll have lots of candidates.

I think any energetic and constructive candidates would be welcomed. It's not a measure of technical achievment, and it's not much of a decision-making role, so go for it if you can help to get things done.

I found some more precise links to Berlin election-night parties (both free of charge):

• Cinestar Wahlparty [1] at Potsdammer Platz: Now it looks like they will only show CNN, but I think they'll have wireless internet there too. I need to check that out. They are showing the Manchurian Candidate remake earlier in the evening, which should raise the emotional stakes a bit. More info.
• Vote44 Wahlparty, at the Traenenpalast (near Ostbahnhof, I think), more info. They say they'll show 3 US stations, but it seems they'll have lots of artistic performances distracting from the simple purity of excessive TV coverage. Maybe a good 2nd choice if things go awry at Potsdammer Platz.

I have been unhealthily obsessed with the U.S. election for the last few months. The end is in sight, but it's very scary.

[1] Note to self: Figure out why pyblosxom's weblog-add.py doesn't like those cinestar URLs.

Yesterday I released a first tarball of glibmm 2.5, with a first version of the Glib::Option command-line parsing API, wrapping GOption. And last week I released gtkmm 2.5.0, with quite a lot of new API from GTK 2.5, such as IconView. Just so you know.

I've had so little time for gtkmm coding these days, so I really could use some help. For instance, gtkmm needs examples, to test the new widgets. The train journey from Berlin to Munich, almost every week, is 6.5 hours, plus 6.5 hours back, and that's almost the only time that I get to do this stuff.

One of the side-effects of signing up to a time-based release schedule is that you promise to do something by a certain date, though it's only really bindings that promise to implement anything specific. And it's the maintainer that makes that promise, not the other contributors, so the maintainer is the one who actually feels the pressure. But, still, there should be enough time.

What is going on with debian? Maybe I'm not looking in the right places, but I still don't see any sign that it's going to be released soon. And Fedora? Still no 3rd-party software or public CVS? Ubuntu looks increasingly like the best hope. Watch them actually _do_ what they say. And help them do it.

This (anonymous) blogger has found just what I was looking for – a multi-screen English-language Election Night event in Berlin, at the Sony Center. I wonder if it will be segregated like a British football match.