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Life: It’s been a busy few days, and I should have been blogging every evening in order to keep up.  (But I didn’t, because I was busy.)  I’ve been packing and getting ready for GCDS and trying to finish off some things before I leave.  I did find time to go swimming with Rio one evening, and yesterday we all went to the fair.  I won a fluffy penguin playing darts.  (I was playing darts, not the penguin.)  Thanks to Alex for the photo on the right.

The future of Metacity: It is fairly clear that Metacity will be replaced by its fork Mutter in the near future: Mutter is effectively Metacity 3.  Although I have some loose ends to tie up in Metacity, it doesn’t seem worth continuing hacking on Metacity 2 when the life is in the other fork.  In addition, there are over five hundred bugs open against Metacity, more than I (as the only active maintainer) can humanly deal with.  Mutter has far more contributors and the bugs will be far more easily dealt with.

CADT: However, this raises a problem.  I can’t just close the bugs because there’s a new version: that would be repeating the GNOME 2.0 mistake which jwz called “cascade of attention-deficit teenagers“.  Therefore I will have to go through several hundred bugs and decide whether they are reproducible with Mutter, and if so reassign them.  This will be a long and dreary job, and if anyone wants to help out I’d be happy to assign them a block.

Nargery: There is also a discussion about whether windows should be able to indicate to compositing managers that they are still working on drawing a window, to save the compositor diving in and drawing the existing pixmap, which may be uninitialised garbage.  Some people question whether compositor-specific hints belong in the EWMH at all, or whether they belong in some separate spec.

Meme: Someone is asking “What was your first word?” Mine was “gone.” My grandfather used to play a game with me when I was a baby. He would take an object, like a building block, and then hide it and say “Gone”.

Links:

• freedesktop.org is in bad shape.  We can all help.
• The building that fell over.
• Giant dominoes: Symbolic toppling. I keep reading that as “symbolic topping”, which must be good on representative cake.
• The longest known word in ancient Greek.

Woke up at a good time, around seven.  Promptly and stupidly decided to go back to sleep to see what the end of the dream was; it turned out to be a nightmare.  Woke up again at about eleven and went to the gym.  Continued the run of stupid mistakes by forgetting to get lunch for Rio.  Sharon came by and brought her lunch instead.  I hate getting up late. :(

Later, went to the diner for dinner.  Talked to Alex about a shelving project he’s working on.

Did a little tidying, but not very much.  But I’ve got some way towards Inbox Zero: I’m now down to four emails.

Today I learned that cd - changes to the directory you were in before the current one.

Fin gave me an old notebook of zirs to use as a logbook.  It’s lovely.

It occurs to me that the simple system I built a while ago which mostly allows Ubuntu to come up in Shavian would also work to get Deseret, Unifon and Tengwar.  I wonder whether there’s much of a market for Ubuntu in Tengwar.  Possibly good Slashdot fodder, anyway.

Joule-for-Dreamwidth is edging closer.  I also need to implement a per-day view with a paging system to get around this problem.

Five days until GCDS starts.

Just got back from Cambridge, where I spent an all too brief time with many wonderful people, such as the Collaborans, and Katie, and ghoti and family. I’m very glad of all of you.

I found Fin’s twenty-four hour comic from 2006 again today. Worth re-reading.

Also, what Maemo 5 needs is robotfindskitten. Definitely.

On Saturday we went to help a friend of ours move house; then we went and ate at a diner called Tom Jones, which was rather good really. On Sunday we went and played D&D again at Bae’s house; my elven cleric used up several saving throws against dying in battle. And today I made dinner: it was spaghetti.

The Mutter maintainers have decided that Mutter will henceforth be a proper fork of Metacity and that the projects will go their own ways. This means, of course, that Metacity will not ship as standard in GNOME 3. I am wondering what should happen to Metacity now; I have a couple of branches to merge, and then I think I would really rather work on Mutter than carry on with a project that practically nobody will use. It would be good to work with a team of others again, too: I’ve been mostly alone on Metacity for a while now.

I have modified the Shavian wiki so that the metadata is held on article pages instead of talk pages. It looks like this. I have been discussing some ideas about this wiki with some people, and I am wondering whether it would be generally more useful if the data was held in IPA format and the Shavian text was produced using a transformation on that data, just as Unifon and so on are now. I am also wondering whether allowing anonymous editing would increase participation enough to be worth the risk of vandalism.

It’s been raining for days. Rio (whose website is now a little out of date) says we should put the rain into jars and call it “bottled annoyance”.

Speaking of Rio, she’s been learning the trumpet for a few months now. Tonight we went to a concert her school were putting on. There was a high school jazz band, too, and now she’s decided she wants to be a jazz trumpeter. She’s asking for trumpet jazz CDs, and Fin is asking whether you have any recommendations. All this makes me want to pick up the bass again. Perhaps I need to take lessons.

We had to take Rothko to the vet. He’ll be fine. The other cats are missing him rather.

I didn’t get much done this weekend; I’ve been feeling kind of out of sorts recently. I did manage to spend an hour or so on Sunday adding Digg support to Joule, and later I added support for Doug Ewell’s spiky rune-like Ewellic alphabet to the Shavian wiki here. Which is your favourite of the scripts we have so far? (You’ll need IE, Safari, or Firefox 3.5 to see them without downloading fonts.)

My parents have been sending me photos of poems I wrote when I was a kid.  The Ballad of the Speaking Clock is one of the less bad ones. :)

Six years ago, Firinel had an idea: would it be possible to track who had friended and unfriended you on LiveJournal over time? I was inspired to work on a project to answer the question, which became Joule. Today I released Joule 3.5, which adds Twitter support– and identi.ca, too. In other words, it’s possible to chart who’s following you on either service. It’s useful to me and thousands of others, and I thought it might be useful to some of you.

Update: Forgot to mention: you can also get RSS feeds out of it.

I’d like to make a page which was like Planet GNOME except that it listed all the tweets and dents that GNOME people were producing. When it grew up, perhaps it could become “asteroid.gnome.org” (because it’s like a mini planet). Bad idea or good idea? Would you read it? Would you like to be on it?

The weather was rather too hot on Tuesday. Wanted to go to the gym but never made it. Later we went out to eat.

Someone in Normandy made a beautiful birthday card using Riordon’s font Riordon Fancy. I suggested to Rio that she could also add the Cyrillic letters to her font, and she seems quite open to the idea. I need to read up more about handwritten Cyrillic.

Ubuntu Women is holding an IRC Q&A on Wednesday evening.

Joule 3.5 (the one with Twitter and identi.ca support) went into beta. There’s still one caching fix I have to make, and I have to rewrite the documentation, and fix whatever problems the testers find. I was rather sad to have to disable support for Twitterers who have tens of thousands of followers (like Neil Gaiman); the actual download and the comparison would have been fine, but the actual part where we write them all into the database made the page take several minutes to load. There is probably a more efficient way of dumping three hundred thousand rows into a database than calling a prepared statement 300,000 times, though, but I’m not sure what it is.

I don’t understand why my great-grandmother wrote some of the things she wrote, and I don’t agree with many of them: rather, I post them in memory of who she was. Some other people have been trying to argue with her, though, which is rather futile since she died 32 years ago.

And I wrote a sonnet for Katie:

I always tried to write about the light
that inks these eyes in instant tint and hue,
that chances glances, sparkles through the night,
fresh as the morning, bloody as the dew;
the light that leaves your image in my mind,
that shining silver, shared for everyone,
that banishes the darkness from the blind,
the circle of the surface of the sun.
And when your light is shining far from mine,
when scores of stars are standing at their stations,
we’ll weave our fingers round them as they shine,
and write each other’s name on constellations;
and so we’ll stand, and still, however far,
lock eyes and wish upon a single star.

1. I passed a may-tree in blossom today, like drinking some strange and sudden potion. Spring lasted a week and summer is upon us.
2. I’ve got less to show for today than I’d like, but in the evening I did get some more work done on Joule-for-Twitter. It basically works now, but it’s not quite ready for release. There is also an identi.ca version, of course.  (For those reading who don’t know what Joule does: it makes it convenient to track who’s reading your stuff. You may find it instructive to look at the chart for me on LiveJournal, or the equivalent graph.)
3. I have decided to rebuild the website for my conlang– a language I’ve been working on since I was a teenager, since before I knew people did so. I lost the site to a domain squatter a while ago, but now I have it back. I have a lot to write down.
4. I have been reading Thoughtcrime Experiments. You might like it, too.
5. I think if I had more patience I would have more sonnets.
6. Carmen, who is wonderful, is looking for people to share her apartment in Berkeley/Oakland.
7. I have been pointed to two guides on how to use tengwar to represent English. They disagree in several points with Omniglot’s guide. I’m not sure who to believe.

Went to play D&D at Bae’s.

Later, merged the Joule branch for doing comparisons in SQL rather than in memory on the webserver; this will make Joule faster and reduce its memory footprint, which will be necessary when Twitter support is turned on, which should be later this week. If you want to follow that, it’s on twitter or on identi.ca. I’m also planning Dreamwidth support.

Rio has been watching Sita Sings the Blues over and over.

While looking through some old files, I found some of the stories I used to tell my sister when she was little. Here’s the one about the lighthouse.

Dyddgu gave me five of my LJ usericons to talk about.

8fool - I’ve always had an affinity for the tarot card called The Fool. Fin commissioned Joanna Barnum to paint me as that archetype. More information is here. The leading 8 is so that I can select it in one keypress, though I don’t currently need to because it’s my default icon.
pretty - Having quite a day of remembering wonderful people who are dead. This is me after I’d had my makeup done by a friend of mine here called Chuck, who also went by Princess Titania, and is now no longer with us. I use this for gender-neutral things and just randomly.
Poto and Cabengo were twins who invented their own language. I read their story in the eighties in Reader’s Digest and was enthralled. Later, their parents suppressed the language, they grew up, and they were last heard of mopping floors somewhere. Fin made the icon; I use it for language things now. If anyone knows where I can find the film about them, I’d love to see it.
otp - this is Ace and Seven (i.e. the seventh regeneration of Doctor Who). OTP = One True Pairing; they’re my favourite Doctor and my favourite Companion and I have occasionally written slash fanfic about them. When I was younger, I always admired Ace and wanted to be more like her. I use the icon mostly for posting about Doctor Who stuff.
yewenwell - I read somewhere when I was 29 that if you didn’t write your first novel in your twenties, you never would.  I therefore made a great effort to start and finish a novel I’ve been trying to write since I wrote the first version in my teens using DisplayWrite 4.  Needless to say, it ran into problems eleven chapters in and didn’t get finished: I’ve never actually finished any of the novels I’ve started.  I hope it’s not actually an omen.  I wasn’t going to post it until it was done, but when I realised it had stalled I posted it anyway (it starts here; people on my friendslist who would like to read it will need to be on an opt-in filter), and this was the icon I used.