I’m back in Berlin after taking holiday in the UK, in London, North Berwick, and Edinburgh.

We didn’t actually spend enough time in Edinburgh and got picky about what shows to see – things seem less worthwhile when they give you free tickets, but did see one wonderful physical/dance thing – Rumble, by a German outfit, actually with some German dialog. It was a hip hop Romeo and Juliet, but far better than you’d expect from that formula and the dodgy name. It was properly choreographed, with humour and appropriate use of music and projections. I really liked that the styles had been fully europeanised. I grinned lots.

I don't think GNOME 2.7/2.8 is getting the testing that 2.5/2.6 got, and that was a scary release cycle. So I don't plan to approve many freeze breaks unless they fix really serious problems.

I haven't been testing it myself recently. I still haven't tried the new MIME type stuff, for instance. Don't assume that it's just your system – make a fuss if there's any problems with important stuff like that.

munichblogs.com and berlinblogs.com have gone blank. It's a planet problem that's been mentioned before. I should have DSL in Berlin today so I can investigate this evening. However, I also have to translate the GNOME Deutschland constitution into English for Tim Ney before I go on holiday, so time is limited. I hate having just evenings free for worthwhile stuff.

On Friday morning (the 20th) I fly to London, then I fly to Edinburgh (North Berwick plus Edinburgh festival) on the evening of the 21st, back in London on the morning of the 25th, and back in Berlin on the evening of the 26th. It's all holiday, so feel free to email/phone me if you want to try to meet.

I just noticed that an eclipse-3-compatible version of the CDT (C Development Tools) was released a month or so ago. Hopefully I can get that onto Debian somehow. This comment from RedHat is good news: Working CDT 2.0 into next product release schedule for August 2004. I currently use one of the other awful IDEs, and obviously I'd like one that is not awful.

Apparently the new Hartz reforms in Germany are going to make life excessively difficult for a lot of unemployed people, but there's clearly something that needs fixing.

For example, unemployed people receive a percentage of the money that they got when they were employed. So an unemployed bank manager gets more than an unemployed laborer. That seems deeply unfair.

Also, there's someone who I would very much like to employ for a few days a month, so he'd receive a few hundred euros. But if he takes that job then he a) gets less than when he's unemployed, instead of it being topped up, and b) When I stop employing him he'll get less than before, because his new previous job paid less. So the system stops me from helping to support an unemployed person, and stops my business from benefiting from his skills/effort.

Honestly, I am a socialist, even if it doesn't sound like it. Most people would prefer to be productive even if they get less for it. It's just that the German system really does seem to be unsustainable. Hopefully a compromise will make things better.

I found an internet cafe around the corner where I can use my laptop, so I was able to upload new versions of glom, gtkmm, glibmm, and gnome-vfsmm. Kreuzberg has 3rd-World internet cafe prices – 1 euro per hour. In a couple of weeks I should have a DSL connection here too.

On saturday I met Daniel Elstner and Frank Rehberger for Indian food and drinks in Kreuzberg and Friedrichshain, and on Sunday I visited one of the many artificial beach bars (the in thing) in Berlin for a late breakfast, with Frank and some of his family and friends.

I need a decent German web site hoster for some of my sites. One that's Linuxy and lets me do Linuxy things. Bytecamp does not seem to be that, though to their credit they do offer free hosting to open-source developers (I'm paying though, so I get to criticise). They only allow access via ftp (so I can't ssh/rsync my stuff onto the site) and don't allow cron jobs (needed for blog planets).

I'd like something like the service I get from Dreamhost, who are based in the U.S. Their basic package is cheap yet hosts 3 domains, with ssh access, cron jobs, mailing-lists, POP and SMTP access, MySQL, full cgi, and generous storage and bandwidth. Sign up via that link if you are interested – it makes a big contribution to my hosting bill. And email me if you know of something similar in Germany or Euroland.

It looks like Martin Schulze will have libsigc 2.0 working with the SUN Forte compiler soon. That will allow gtkmm 2.4 to work with that compiler too. It has worked fine with gtkmm 2.0 and 2.2 for a while. As well as being a great signal/slot API, libsigc 2.0 is a hell of a C compiler test suite. It's a good thing we have gcc.

Damien Carbery at SUN has been _really_ helpful and patient with this. He must have tested at least 10 tarballs by now. As usual Martin Schulze is doing a great job of maintaining libsigc , and solving the more difficult problems.

SUN have offerered GNOME a SUN Box plus Forte compiler, but I don't think the GNOME sysadmins have figured out where to host it yet.

Update: I guess weblog-add.py does not like plus symbols in posts. You get to guess where they are missing.

I saw Fahrenheit 9/11 a couple of days ago. If you read newspapers regularly then it doesn't contain much that's new, but it does package things up nicely for the average undecided voter. I think it actually tries to mention too many details, probably so it doesn't all look like unfounded insinuation. But a film is not the place for detalied citation of research and references. It looks like House of Bush, House of Saud contains more appropriate back-up material.

On one hand, it's a bit silly to focus on how corrupt one set of politicians are. All mainstream politicians (particularly the Republicans and Democrats in America) are terribly corrupt, with all kinds of conflicts of interests. But the Bush administration is an order of magnitude more corrupt so it's really worth taking the shots at this easy target.

Ralph Nader wanted Bush to win so it would show some real differences between the 2 parties, stimulate debate, and force them to take some principled positions. I think he was a bit too successful, and rather than wait for electoral reform, I'd prefer to see the slightly-less-corrupt party in power than the totally-corrupt-party. Otherwise the U.S. is going to break down completely. The framers of the constitution did not foresee this.

Before I saw the film I had been worried about the mention of the Bin Laden being flown out of the U.S. without following proper procedures. Though they are not exactly working class heroes, it sounded like a racist and insubstantial claim that those members of the Bin Laden family were somehow guilty by association, though they mostly disowned Osama years ago. So, I was glad that the film does not make this accusation and really just uses the incident to show the incredible influence that the Saudis have within the Bush administration.

The focus on the suffering of U.S. troops is a middle-America vote-winner but it's kind of distasteful. I guess the undecided voters are not ready to consider that the deaths of tens of thousands of Iraqis civilians are just as tragic as a those of a thousand U.S. soldiers.

It's not a great documentary or work of art, but it tells Americans some of the things they need to know, in the crude way they want to hear it. People have called it propaganda, and it's certainly like an extended campaign advert. But I don't think it's comparable to the classic WW2 propaganda of Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, and the Allies. Those were about demonizing whole cultures and races of people, instilling mortal fear of them and encouraging violence against them. Farenheit 9/11 does not do that, though the Bush administration arguably used those techniques to justify the Iraq war.

From what I read of the John Kerry nomination speach, he seems to have summarised many of the same points, probably for the same reasons. People don't like being lied to, and tend to hold the grudge when voting.

I'm not a U.S. citizen, but this election will have a massive influence on the whole world, for the rest of our lives.

Sorry for the rant.