It doesn’t look like I can get the Ximian Connector to work with Infineon’s Exchange server because they have some stupid 2-stage login procedure. Why must large companies be so slow to do anything, yet somehow so quick to do the difficult stupid things? It’s a pity – I was impressed with the simplicity of the Connector’s setup process and I had a good feeling that it would work well on a normal network.

So now people must still endure my Outlook-generated non-threading emails and I must endure the pain of using it. It’s particularly annoying that the preview pane insists on downloading all the dodgy images from my junk email, thus confirming that my email address works.

Yikes

I killed my hard disk again. I do this often. Time for a reinstall.

After seeing my umpteenth “There are errors!” dialog box I have come to the definite conclusion that ClearCase is written by Daleks. Now at least I have someone to blame. Davros!

The ongoing GNOME website changes produced some unpleasantly unconstructive reactions. This finally got to me when I saw someone insisting that nobody should try to help. Although this was just a lot of bizarrely vicious nonsense from a small group of unusually bitter people, it does give me an excuse to make a couple of useful points.

Power

Like most open source projects there is nobody in GNOME who has any real power or who is able to make decisions just because of their position. Some names are more familiar than others and some peoples' opinions are more valued than others, because they are active or known for their good sense. They are still just opinions without force. And one characterisic of the best contributors is that they are ready to be persuaded by better arugments.

We have some official groups such as the GNOME foundation and the GNOME release team, but both are clearly subservient to the GNOME community. Anything else would be foolish because there is no way for them to force anybody to do anything. It turns out that you can get a lot more done when you accept that fact and work with it. I wrote some documentation for the release team recently that stresses that point.

So nobody should be blaming an imagined leadership instead of fixing what they care about. Apathy is so 80s.

JFDI

Because nobody has any real power, stuff only gets done when somebody decides to do it. Anybody is free to do stuff as long as they aren't complete muppets.

Some random examples:

• jdub has been reworking the GNOME web sites. He happens to be on the foundation board and release team but he was the one who did this work because he was the one who did this work. It could have been organised a little better, but nobody made any great effort to do do that.
• I write a lot of emails and poke at bugzilla, trying to encourage decisions and activity when it looks like nobody else is going to do it. (For instance, The 2.4 new modules threads on desktop-devel-list, the ui-review status, trying to get agreement on GTK+ 2.4 changes for the HIG). I don't pretend to be an expert but I don't need to be. Being on the release-team makes me feel pressure to do this kind of thing, but you don't need to be on the release-team to do it. Now that I'm in the swing of it, I'll probably continue to do this kind of thing even when I'm not on the release team.

• People keep complaining about developer documentation. They do neither the easy things (submit bugzilla bugs when they find
  undocumented or badly-documented functions) or the difficult things (submit patches, or try to organise the whole API documentation effort). They should do something. If you have time to whine on gnomedesktop.org then you have time to help yourself by using bugzilla. If you think the problem is bigger then you should find out how you can improve it by posting on mailing lists.

• There is a hell of a lot of activity in bugzilla – people are analysing problems and finding solutions. Lots of these intermediate contributions don't even show up in ChangeLogs. Recently I noticed that lots of people are making lots of simple but significant usability changes, making applications more HIG-compliant. (Hopefully this bugzilla query shows the HIG and usability bugs closed in the last month.) They are just getting on with it, because they care.

It can take a little while to get acclimatised but it's just a question of being polite and constructive. one of my first emails to a GNOME list shows that I took a while to learn. Get involved. Don't rant. Be concise.

Take a look at the How To Help page if you want to make a difference.

Another week of long hours fighting against ClearCase for the right to read and edit our own source code. Some companies just can’t pay enough for awful products. Many CEOs and CTOs would pay fortunes to be kicked repeatedly in the gonads, and many do.

I’ll be in Nuernberg again for the first half of next week.

Blogging is better when you are as mad as an owl.

gtkmm

gcc 3.3 seems to have various bugs that are making life difficult for the Debian package maintainers. But I guess someone has to experience bugs first.

A while I ago I promised myself never to pay for any microsoft product ever again, what with the quality being so abysmal, but I have wanted to take a look at Windows XP for a while. I finally got hold of a copy and achieved blue screen in an as yet unprecedented five seconds after installation. The Windows XP installation is significantly less user-friendly than RedHat's, and it then leaves you with a fairly nonsensical desktop. After I fixed the bluescreenness (XP's NVidea driver) I then became outraged at how, every time you make an internet connection, it tells you that you need an MS passport account to do that. That's such a blatant anti-trust violation. Those bastards.

I discovered that you can restore the grub bootloader after Windows destroys it by first making a boot diskette (/sbin/mkbootdisk –device /dev/fd0) and then reinstalling grub (/usr/sbin/grub-install /dev/hda, I think) after booting from that disk.

gtkmm

I think I'm getting back on top of the bugs now. I don't like having too long a list of things to do.

I wrote this little <a href=”https://www.murrayc.com/murray/subjective/management_open_source.shtml”>What Managers Can Learn From Open Source</a> document to make me feel better. That which inspires it most lately is getting fantastically worse.

gtkmm

A think I finally fixed the latest little gtkmm lifetime bug – an occasional leak. Harold Hopfes really dug deep into GTK+ and gtkmm with startling energy to help analyse the bug. He seems to be one of a team of gtkmm developers at EADS. As the bugzilla bug shows, we went backwards and forwards a few times trying to find the problem and solution.

orbitcpp

Another great hacker who seems to have exploded, fully-formed out of freak lightning strikes and nuclear waste, Bowie Owens is doing ever more fantastic work on orbitcpp, fixing all kinds of stuff that I should be doing for him. This guy seems to know his CORBA.

GNOME

I did a very superficial ui-review on gnome-meeting. I am suddenly rather concerned about its user interface but I’m sure that everything can be fixed very easily.

I’ll be in Nuremberg next week and apparently I’m to work 80 hours or so in 5 days. I expect to lose all sanity and hope by the weekend. There are murmurs of an open network connection there, but I don’t think I’ll have a chance to do any wortwhile stuff with it.

I have a new toy – a copy of Ximian‘s Connector so the GNOME lists don’t have to suffer the hopeless Outlook-ness of my emails, but I won’t be able to try it out until the week after next. Outlook (well, actually the hopeless corporate Exchange setup) is one of the few reasons that we use Windows desktops in this department, so I’m looking forward to showing that it’s not necessary.

The other day as I was sitting in a doorway with my laptop using an open wi-fi, a small child asked me if I was homeless.

GUADEC is done and a success. Thanks to gman and his helpers it was the best yet. I really didn't expect it to run so smoothly, not because gman was organising it, but because none of seemed to be helping him enough. If only he could organise every GUADEC. Daniel Pisano also deserves many thanks for arranging the perfect accommodation.

My talk was a shambles again, possibly more than last year. I type up notes and then realise that I can't actually read them on the desk while I'm standing up, so I just show the slides and burble about what's on them. The talk is online, in a more structured form.

The combined efforts of several GNOME hackers got one of my WLAN cards working, and educated me about how to do WLAN networking stuff on the command line. Thanks Daniel Pisano (docpi) and frehberg in particular. It's kind of fun having the connection while sitting in the lecture halls, particularly irc, and it means you can get something done during the more dull presentations.

I was utterly demotivated before GUADEC and conciously avoided any new responsibility that might arrise from talking to people, but despite my determination to be glum, even I was eventually enthused by the sheer youth, energy, and activity around us.

We tend to forget it until after every GUADEC, but these face-to-face meetings really help to motivate us. Luckily it sounds like the Boston meeting will be repeated, somewhere else in America, so that other continent can get the benefit too.

Here are some significant people that I met this time:

• RossBurton, Dan Alderman, and another colleague, who are using gtkmm quite intensively at OneEighty Software. Their company paid for their trip while I took unpaid holiday. Maybe I should ask for sponsorship next time. At least Dan bought me a Guiness, possibly the first direct payment that I've received for gtkmm. I wasn't expecting them to be there, so it was nice during my talk when I said that lots of corporations use gtkmm and someone in the audience backed up my claim.
• Antonio Sáenz from Isotrol in Seville who also use gtkmm and who is getting more and more involved with GNOME and free-software itself. He's seems to be making good progress with local business and government in Spain and other countries too. Lots of other spanish oragnisations and individuals were at this year's GUADEC, so last year's GUADEC in Seville clearly had an impact.
• Dave Malcolm, who is now working on Conglomerate with great enthusiasm and sense. This app isn't quite there yet, but it's very close to being a very usable generic XML editor with very wide appeal. It's an app that should exist. Dave should be on advogato.
• jdahlin, who is working on the Python bindings, and actually tried to convert me from the evils of C++. Live and let live. jamesh stills seems to be the nicest person in the world, and had could at least claim that the ORBit bindngs are easier in Python. By the way, have you seen the GTK+ bindings page recently? It's vast.
• The release-team, some of whom I had never met in person. Pensive silences during meetings are far more helpful when you can see people's faces. We worked out the final 2.4 new modules list, which I expect jdub will email soon. We're sorry that it's terribly terribly late.
• Tim Ney, the GNOME Foundation director/administrator, and Leslie Proctor our invaluable PRist. These are two of the least known, but most positive and helpful people in our community. Also, Stormy Peters from HP, who seem to be supporting Linux and GNOME far more than I suspected.
• Fernando Herrera, the new bug-buddy maintainer. It sounds like he's doing important stuff that will make it easier to triage bugs in future. More importantly, he's full of energy and is a good laugh while enjoying a Guinness.
• Carlos Garnacho, the gnome-system-tools maintainer now that Ximian no longer expect to make money from them. I really wish these were ready for GNOME 2.4. I pray they are in GNOME 2.6. He seems really dedicated to them.

Before flying back I went on a quest for some UK-style essentials. Alpen and Cider. I should have bought some vegetables to avoid the strange look at the checkout.

Perpetual GNOME

Among other things, I put these pages together during some lectures:

• GNOME How To Get Involved
• GNOME 2.4 UI Review
• GNOME UI Review Check-List

Both of these need to be improved/updated by people who have more of a clue. I really hope that we can get the GNOME community running pretty much perpetually with no barrier to entry.

I've noticed that you can make a difference just by getting things started or asking what's happening. It doesn't take expertise to do that.

Linz

So I'm back in Linz, in connection hell. I think it's my WLAN antenna that's broken, but I have no idea how to get a new one in Austria without having one delievered from Germany at great expense.

I have found a spot where I can get a fairly reliable connection, but it is in the middle of the street and it's a problem when cars come by. This does not seem like something that an adult should be doing.

Oh, and work is deeply unpleasant. ClearCase now refuses to let us see our own source code. People pay for ClearCase, but I don't know why.

Still no cvs access. I’m trying with the cisco card again but mysteriously can’t log into any hotspots even with that. I’m getting pretty sick of the network settings stuff but I don’t know if it’s the fault of RedHat or linux in general. In the past I have had to manually delete config files to get stuff working but they seem to be duplicated in three different places. Adding and removing PC cards generally mucks up all the settings, because it tries to remember stuff instead of scanning on every bootup. I don’t see why I should have to edit /etc/modules.conf just to delete some alias crap that isn’t true anymore. My only consolation is that I know it would be even worse under Windows.

This lack of connection is killing me. I can’t even push things forward via email because everything depends on stuff that’s stuck on my hard drive. I have had so little time for my projects lately, but at least I could work offline and upload stuff occasionally during the past few weeks. But now I can’t even carry out the least of my responsibilites.

Meanwhile I have a crushing and demoralising schedule at work which leaves me without any extra time or energy. I hate ClearCase as much as I can possibly hate any software. It is as crappy as everyone ever said it was. Anyone who thinks it is acceptable does not have experience with anything else that isn’t as crappy. It’s been a long time since a piece of software has made me wonder whether I would actually feel better if I drove my fist through the screen. This is not good.

For gtkmm, this kind of problem was supposed to be avoided by having two maintainers, but danielk has been totally off the radar for months and doesn’t reply to emails. There are lots of regular contributors but no obvious new maintainer (nobody to review patches and bugs), so I guess I am tied to that for now whatever the cost.

One bright spot is that Bowie Owens has been doing incredibly good, sensible, work on orbitcpp, and lots of it, and it looks like he can take over maintainership. I spent several hours here and there last week doing a big simplification of the stubs/skels/common confusion but that work is still stranded on my hard drive.

Bryan Forbes is also making good progress with gnome-vfsmm, but he’s only just got involved and he’s still learning about gtkmm so I can’t hit him with too much responsibility just yet.

I’ve offerered a few times to step down from the GNOME release team to make way for someone with more time and resources, but they haven’t taken up the offer. And according to the JFDI principle, I’m not confident that some stuff would get done without me. That’s generally a mistake.

So, I plan to do my best for the GNOME 2.4 release cycle with the aim of mostly disappearing afterwards, leaving stuff documented so that everything works without me.

It’s been difficult enough to survive during the past year, let alone be properly involved with GNOME. I’ll be in Dublin next week for GUADEC but don’t expect me to be enthusiastic or constructive. I’m doing what I can.

GNOME on the other hand is doing great. It’s vital and lively and focused and making great progress.

All my cvs and irc access in the last 2 months has been via WLAN hotspots, because

• I work at the offices of a very big slow-witted german corporation that doesn’t allow use of the real internet through its proxy.
• To get DSL at home, after numerous dull and time-consuming problems, Austria Telekom tell me they need to replace a telphone pole, but refuse to give an even approximate date for it, while subtly refusing to say that it will never happen.

Now my WLAN antenna seems to be broke, so stuff is stranded on my hard disk. I am not enjoying this. In August I need to find a new place to live. That might makes things better or worse.