I watched the Kerry v. Bush debate on BBC World last night at 3am with Daniel Elstner at my place in Berlin. I was glad that Kerry made the key points about deception and incompetence, and when I looked at the repeats close-up I saw that Bush backed up the incompetence theme quite well with the bizarre blinky village-idiot look.

I'll be in Brno again next week.

I recently finished watching the 2 series of The Office on DVD. I thought I'd catch up on some British TV culture, because I haven't seen anything after The Fast Show. But I can't really enjoy it. I grew up with these thames-corridor/west-country/estuary accents and they still grind my nerves. And I can't think of anything in the show that I haven't actually witnessed in real workplaces over the years. It's all too horribly real. The familiar shots of car parks and roundabouts in the opening titles make me so glad that I escaped.

Also, I am Tim.

I’m back in Berlin after a week in Brno, in the Czech republic. We had almost no chance to see anything but the inside of a meeting room. Our hotel was so far away that it was in Austria, past the border crossing. I’ll probably be back there next week, and in Munich at the weekends.

I am quite glad to be missing Munich’s Oktoberfest this year. It’s boring and it’s violent. If they had Guinness instead of dull dull Helles then I might see the point.

All next week I'll be working in Brno (AKA Bruenn in German), in the Czech Republic. There's no good reason for this that I can think of, so I hope it's nice there.

First, I'm looking forward to the weekend back in Munich.

Have I mentioned lately that ClearCase is failure? 15 hours to check the source out for a project. Case closed.

This Interview with the CEO and CTO of E28 is fascinating to me. You might not have heard of E28, but they are a chinese daughter company of one of the established Taiwanese designer/manufacturers, and have deals with others in Taiwan. Taiwan (and probably mainland China) is the present and future of mobile phone design, and they are heavily into Linux.

I look forward to seeing these open APIs one day. I'm particularly interested in how they integrate/abstract the various implementations of the various proprietary audio and video codecs, which probably all need to be licensed individually.

At approximately UTC 13:00 on Wednesday, GNOME 2.8.0 will be released, when Jeff hits the big release button in Sydney. Then we can spend the day reading glowing reviews and enjoying the adoration of slashdotters, and wondering what’s next in GNOME 2.10.

And on Wednesday evening, some of us will be celebrating the birth of GNOME 2.8 (and the secret yllari project) in Berlin. Well, Frank and I will be, and danielk if I can track him down. GNOME hackers and users in Berlin are very welcome to join us at Dos Piranhas at Yorckstraße 81, at approx. 19:00. For people who are trying to find us, I look like this:

and Frank looks like this:

Neither of us can do anything about that.

The GNOME release team are receiving a small avalanche of hard code freeze break requests. Maybe people can inately sense that the 2.8 release cycle is two weeks shorter than normal.

This stage in the release cycle usually scares me senseless. We have to weigh up a) fixing fairly serious bugs, with b) the risk of introducing worse bugs by accident. Fixers for crashes almost always get accepted. The number of serious bugs that are being fixed at the last moment reinforces my suspicion that GNOME 2.7/2.8 has not been tested as much as normal.

This time we have lots of Evolution patches to look at as well. The Evolution team at Novell/Ximian are doing a great job of adapting to the GNOME release process along with the tough in-house procedures that they seem to follow already. It can't be nice for them to have to ask people like me for permission to apply patches, but I'm glad that they already know how to make software stable.

Anyway, yadda yadda, GNOME 2.8 is on schedule for September 15th. GNOME says they are going to do it, and then they do it. People like that.

Until I tried this in Internet Explorer, I thought that this worldwide US presidential election thing was maybe a Florida-related satire.

John, I know, but national polls of the
popular vote are used as a innacurate measure of
what might be happening in all the swing states, particularly if the samples are selected to be somehow representative of the country. Obviously they are not much good for that, but there are probably more of them than state polls, and they probably have more consistent methodologies, so it's not surprising that people use them that way.

The electoral vote projections are all over the place as well. I'd like to see a poll to find out how many registered voters know the difference.