Category: planet

I went to H&R Block today to get our taxes done. I gave myself quite a headache doing it. Afterwards I went to the gym and worked out a bit, then walked back home, but everyone was out so I went to Subway and bought lunch. Today hasn’t been wonderfully productive other than that.

I think the Journal of the Simplified Spelling Society is no longer publishing, which is a shame, because if it was I’d write them a paper about the Shavian wiki from a spelling reform point of view rather than from a computational linguistics point of view.  (Incidentally, gnome in Shavian is a little guy going “Yay!”, appropriately.)

I was only asked two questions on that question meme:

1. What’s your phone number? I have lost the charger, so nobody can phone me, I’m afraid.
2. Have you ever had poetry or prose published? Sort of. I wrote a poem at the age of about nine that was published in Puffin Post— I won a copy of one of the Wizard of Oz books for that. And I had a few sonnets printed in the local church magazine. Other than that, not really. Soberly and without false humility, I don’t really think anyone wants to pay to read what I write: formal verse is unfashionable.

I have mentioned before that there are a few dozen people in this world whose hobby is transliterating public-domain documents like The Wizard of Oz into the Shavian alphabet. It occurred to me about a week ago that they are performing the transliteration of most of the words many times, and it ought to be possible for some kind of tool to automate this. It would further mean the creation of something useful which doesn’t currently exist: a free electronic pronouncing lexicon of British English.

So I present the Shavian Wiki. It’s an ordinary MediaWiki installation, but with the added quirk that any page whose name begins with “Document:” is transliterated on the fly by looking each word up in the wiki itself— so this turns into this.  This is done with a custom extension which was trivial to write; I am much impressed at the flexibility of MediaWiki. (If you can’t see Shavian writing there, you will need to install a suitable font.)

And then of course you can dump the lexicon any time you like and you’ll have your own wiki-powered pronouncing dictionary.

I spent a few hours setting this up about a week ago, plus the occasional lunchbreak hacking here and there, and the members of the Shaw Alphabet Yahoo group descended on it and did the rest of the work: wiki power is an amazing thing.

There are now nearly 4,000 words in the lexicon and it’s growing fast.  We’d welcome anyone who wants to join in, but you have to create an account to edit.

Also, here’s a relevant comic.

There is a venerable bulletin board at Cambridge called GROGGS: it celebrates its 25th anniversary this year. It uses a custom protocol called RGTP, which is reminiscent of a centralised, non-threaded form of NNTP.

In 2002, I wrote a CGI interface to GROGGS called yarrow, which is now the most popular RGTP client (a big fish in a very small pond), and this week just gone I had to move my yarrow installation to another server.  It took me a few days to get around to it, and so I took the opportunity to put yarrow on Launchpad so anyone who wants can run their own installation in case anything happens to me.  (There are other clients you can use, including the very full-featured GREED for Emacs, and a Perl library if you fancy writing your own client.)

Back in 2002 I also wrote an RGTP server in Python called spurge, which is not the rgtpd used on GROGGS, and I put spurge on Launchpad this week as well.  Back in the day a few other sites ran spurge and yarrow together to make a no-frills bulletin board system, but I don’t know whether anyone else is still doing this.

Anyway, if anyone wants them, there they are.  I apologise for any infelicities in the source; my programming skills have improved in the last seven years.  Patches and enhancements are of course welcome; I don’t have much time to work on them any more, so it’s best that they’re publicly available.  I would like to debianise them, but I don’t know enough about the intricacies of the Python policy.

Cambridge people who want to join in with GROGGS are welcome to apply for a GROGGS account, and anyone can play with the test server if they want to know what RGTP feels like in practice.

Photo © Tom The Photographer, cc-by-nc-nd.

Here’s RiordonFancy version 4.0.  Rio has added the euro sign (someone should have told us it was missing!), the cent sign, a few dingbats (like the snowman), and I’ve added a fontlog and tidied the spacing a little.  I hope this goes far enough to clear up the problems raised in Fedora bug 478570.  If not, let me know.  If anyone wants characters it doesn’t cover, let us know too. (Is anyone using it for Icelandic out there?  and I suppose we could use this as an educational project to learn about the Cyrillic or Greek alphabets…)

I’m keeping track of some of the interesting places it’s turning up.  The oddest one so far is a sign-maker for EBay.  Let us know if you find anywhere else (or use it yourself somewhere interesting!)

Several years ago I promised people poems on a subject of their choice. I am just starting to complete them. Probably some people who asked don’t even have me friended any more…

dyddgu asked for a sonnet, possibly in Welsh. I tried, but I just couldn’t get it together, so:

My Welsh is just not good enough for verse.
My “dw i’n hoffi coffi”‘s lacking fizz;
cynghanedd is pedestrian or worse;
I wish it wasn’t so, but there it is.
My struggle’s still to learn, as yours to teach,
and so my englyn’s still in English sung,
and aching awdls cower out of reach,
and English shows the thinness of the tongue.
But here’s my goal: some month the Gorsedd meet
so many miles ahead— I may be there
to share my bitter words, my verses sweet,
at common table. Never mind the chair.
But that’s a dream, and not what’s on the card,
and much as I might dream— for now— I’m barred.

I was asked where I got the tools to make graphs like this one (for this post).  It’s a custom variation on Federico’s Performance Scripts which outputs SVG instead. You can get it here.  It reads in the strace output in the same format as Federico’s scripts, and prints out SVG.  You can use inkscape or whatever you like to mark it up then.  It could probably be improved a whole lot, but I offer it here in case it’s useful.

I had the idea a while ago, but there ought to be a TweetCode, like the Geek Code for Twitter. This evening I wrote it. Thanks to Katie for suggestions of categories; if you can think of some more they’re very welcome and should be tweeted to #tc. Feedback always welcome.

Several years ago 2amcoffee challenged me to write a ballade about kitten toes. I was asked to re-post it the other day with some pictures that Alex has been taking of our kitten, Rothko. Interestingly, this person has apparently borrowed my title in the meantime.

A dozen years, the length of feline days:
compared to human lives it may appear
the cats lose out. To be a human pays.
I think on this, and on companions dear:
Successive cats whose whiskered lives touched mine
Have lain upon my lap— do you suppose
Their tiptoe through the years is but a sign?
I measure out my life with kitten toes.

As they and I pursue the hilly ways
that fill our lives, “Beware! The end is near!”
“Your death is nigh!” or some such friendly phrase
will tell me that it’s all downhill from here.
And soon the slope more steeply will incline,
And drop away as quickly as it rose.
You trace the arc? My life is on the line:
I measure out my life with kitten toes.

Though now, my cat, we feel the sunshine’s blaze—
your windowsill is warm, the skies are clear—
yet still I feel the sun’s all-seeing gaze
remind me of the coming day, I fear—
the coming day I cannot feel it shine,
and on my face the smiling daisy grows.
I only have the one, where you have nine:
I measure out my life with kitten toes.

Prince, lord of cats, may endless meat be thine!
O grant that thine immortal princely doze
may evermore upon my lap recline!
I measure out my life with kitten toes.

I should get back into writing verse for challenges more.

Feeling rather awful this morning, but attempting to work anyway.  Fin made me breakfast. It was lovely.

Last night, I removed more metacity-specific dialogue code and replaced it with calls to Zenity. The solution used GLib signals; I may also use them to replace a few homebrew callback systems.

The other night I spent a few minutes using Perl to turn English text from the Latin to Shavian alphabets. You can play with it if you like. You can get more into 140 characters that way!

If any Pango expert reading this has an idea why in GNOME bug 571056 (code snippets attached there) Pango fails to report the height of mixed English and Telugu text, I would love to hear about it.

And as ever, don’t forget to keep up with the Metacity blog.

riordon and plexq and I went to baerana‘s house and played D&D with bored2sleep GMing. I’d never played before, and it was interesting. The whole session was taken up with designing our characters, so we didn’t play at all yet.  And I now have sparkly orange d12s and d20s and so on. They are beautiful. I am going to carry them around with me for a bit.

In other news, the fine AWN folks just released 0.3.2.  I’m enjoying keeping up with the AWN project, and it stresses the compositor in interesting ways.  I’m running it now in addition to gnome-panel.  Look into it.