Month: October 2009

I’m happy to announce the first experimental version of Metacity with support for CSS window borders (“Cowbell”). This work was largely supported by Collabora Ltd.

You can:

• download the tarball;
• read the documentation (it’s not as boring as you might imagine);
• review the source history.

This diagram should explain everything, perhaps.

I would especially like to hear from:

• theme artists, to let me know whether it’s adequately powerful;
• anyone else interested in hacking on this with me;
• the GTK client-side decoration people, so that we can harmonise the way we represent things;
• people who know a lot about CSS and can offer insights into the suitability of the way we represent things;
• people who know a lot about the Dublin Core and can offer insights into whether our metadata system uses it appropriately;
• maintainers of other window managers (especially Mutter), so we can talk about including CSS support in other window managers;
• everyone else, to suggest which of the directions for future development are most interesting.

I think it may perhaps be helpful to set up a Cowbell mailing list, so that we can compare notes on implementations. For example, I haven’t written down anywhere how to place an image to the right of the title, which is commonly needed (you use border-image).

Photo © Craft*ology, cc-by-nc.

• Spent most of the day hacking CSS and window managers.
• Posted a message to the release team, which came back as a haiku.
• Later, went with Rio, Katie, and SaraMae to the rather early Halloween parade.
• Discovered that triolets.org wasn’t registered, and registered it in case I ever decide to build a triolet bake-off site where all the people who love to write triolets can try to build the best one. On the other hand, maybe there’d just be me and Hilaire Belloc there.
• I released the 404 sonnet under Creative Commons, but you already heard about that.
• “Well, they only asked me to crop out the head.”

I haven’t posted for a while.  Here are four things:

1. Collabora have been supporting the CSS-on-window-borders project recently by letting me work on it during work hours.  Here is a status update.
2. Recent updates to shavian.org.uk include a gentle Shavian tutorial and translations of all the recent XKCDs into Shavian.
3. Many years ago, I wrote a sonnet for use on a server’s custom 404 page:
   

   So many years have passed since first you sought
   the lands beyond the edges of the sky,
   so many moons reflected in your eye,
   (familiar newness, fear of leaving port),
   since first you sought, and failed, and learned to fall,
   (first hope, then cynicism, silent dread,
   the countless stars, still counting overhead
   the seconds to your final voyage of all…)
   and last, in glory gold and red around
   your greatest search, your final quest to know!
   yet… ashes drift, the embers cease to glow,
   and darkened life in frozen death is drowned;
   and ashes on the swell are seen no more.
   The silence surges. Error 404.

   It’s been spreading itself around, mostly without my permission, so I’m releasing it under a Creative Commons licence.  Fly free, little sonnet!  Please feel free to copy it onto your own sites, and if you would, let me know you’ve done so.

4. I need to write more of the Maemo tutorials.  They will be coming soon.  Sorry; things have been busy.

There has been a small surge of interest in translating (or transliterating) Ubuntu into the Shavian alphabet, possibly by means of the automated transliterator I mentioned a few weeks ago.

A small team has formed; if anyone else would like to join, they will be most welcome.  I’m a bit busy to do a huge amount of the work, but I am providing support and some of my existing transliteration resources.  Also, wiki pages are being worked on.  And discussion, most of it in the alphabet, is continuing on #ubuntu-l10n-en-shaw on freenode. See you there, perhaps.

If this works out, it will be simple to produce Deseret and Tengwar transliterations of Ubuntu as well.  Is anyone interested in those?

In unrelated news, the book I mentioned in my last post now has its own website, where you can read some of the story for yourself.

(Logo mashup by permission.)