Category: planet

A rather fascinating discussion is going on on gnome-i18n (which has spilled over onto legal-list and kde-i18n-doc) over the Yoruba, Hausa and Igbo translations I mentioned last month. The current questions are:

• Is a translation of a program a derived work within the terms of that program’s licence?
• If something should have been released under the GPL, because it’s a derived work of something else that is known to have been released under the GPL, how much can we assume it was released under the GPL?
• Since compiled translations can be trivially decompiled, should the compiled (.mo) versions be forced to store licence information found in the source files (.po)?
• If so, does this mean we should expect build tools to force all compiled software to carry licence information?

If you’re going to weigh in, it’s better to weigh in there than here.

Photo (c) Melvin “Buddy” Baker, cc-by.

Today it’s been a bit quiet since Katie left. I washed up, and went to the gym for the first time since Christmas, and was quite surprised that I could still lift the same amounts of weights as before. I put on a stone over the holidays, so I need to work that off. I made dinner tonight: it was pierogies and beans. Also, I made the first post for a while on the Metacity blog. I upgraded to Jaunty but this seems to have broken the mp3 player. I also spent a while installing bip; most of the time was spent fighting the hashing algorithm which didn’t like some of the funny characters I had in the password I originally chose. I don’t know why it doesn’t just require you to make the file unreadable by anyone else and store the password in plaintext like pidgin does– or at most use md5.

Rather excited about Launchpad being released.

Here, have a silly meme.

What are your nicknames?
I don’t really have any.

What’s your Chinese Astrology sign? Be specfic, with the element and stuff!
bunny. more than that, I don’t know.

What’s the last book you read?
A Child’s Christmas in Wales.

What color shirt are you wearing now?
very dark blue with a quotation from Horace on it (not in translation).

Are you an introvert or extrovert?
Intro.

Mozilla Firefox or Internet Explorer?
Usually Firefox, sometimes Epiphany, sometimes Lynx.

Do you nap a lot?
no.

What was/were your favorite childhood toys?
Mrs Squirrel, David the bear, and Joanna the cat.

What’s your current fandom/obsession/addiction?
notably short of them.

What are you currently reading?
nothing, actually. need to fix that.

What was the last thing you ate today?
Bowl of Weetabix. Thanks, Katie.

How long does it take you to get ready in the morning?
I actually have a list of things to do in the morning called Rhaglen Bore. It takes a bit over half an hour to do all of them, though I sometimes miss some of them out.

What websites do you visit daily?
Mission St Clare, the bank, Planet GNOME, BBC news in Welsh (those are actually in Rhaglen Bore), and LJ and Facebook and of course Google.

What’s the last movie you watched?
good grief, I don’t remember.

Do you like to clean?
yes. I think my word for this year should be Tidy.

What time is your usual bedtime?
I like it being about twelve-ish.

Do you read any web comics?
yes, xkcd.

What is your favorite weather?
autumn rain.

Where would you see yourself in ten years?
I have trouble seeing myself in ten days. Why should I plan ten years ahead? It would only need to be changed before then when other things came up.

This last week and a bit, Katie came to visit us from England.

It’s been a wonderful couple of weeks spending time with her. We stayed at home quite a lot, but we also went out to eat in some places and played Fluxx, and Apples to Apples. And we went to the farmers’ market, where Katie found a bunny:

We went to Philly and ate cheesesteak and visited the Shoe, but we don’t have pictures of that. And another day, we went to New York City:

I’ve never been there before, so it was quite exciting. Katie and Alex went up to the top of the Empire State Building, but I don’t do heights very well so I stayed in the lobby with Fin and we drank coffee. Later we met Colette, who took us to a Ukrainian restaurant called Veselka, where I had borscht for the first time, which was lovely, and also drank a lime rickey, which I hadn’t even heard of before. Also, pierogies. Then we went off to visit Bluestockings, but they were having a speaking event, so it was rather hard to browse. I hope we can come back sometime when it’s quieter.

And now we’ve just taken Katie back to the airport, and it was very sad to say goodbye. I’m hoping we’ll all see one another again soon.

Photos are all by Alex.

This is RiordonFancy version 3. We’ve added all the accented letters she was asked for (in particular, there should be all the Polish, Czech, Spanish, and Portuguese characters) and some others, though there are still gaps and quite possibly a few errors. The licence is now OFL, which is DFSG-free, so you should be able to combine it with anything free you wish. Thanks for all your feedback so far! Let us know how you get on with it, if you like.

This will be quick because I’m doing something else, but I want to write this down and ask people about it. Why is it that Nautilus shows the same icon for all TTF files? Wouldn’t it be fairly simple to write a thumbnailer that showed two representative letters like “Ij” from each font (or some other letters if it didn’t contain the Latin alphabet)? And the same program would be the default application for TTF and would just show a sample from each font when you double-clicked a font’s icon in Nautilus. And there’d be an “install this font” button on the page, so you could download a font and install it without arsing around with dragging it to ~/.fonts. OS X has something like this and it’s dead useful. It would be simple to write in perl and I could do it in an evening. Has someone already done this and I haven’t found it and it’s just not shipped by default in Ubuntu so I’m not seeing it, or is there some reason it’d be a bad idea, or should I just do it?

My ten-year-old daughter Riordon has been designing a font on paper and I’ve been building it in FontForge. RiordonFancy version 2 contains the whole ASCII set including all the numerals, and (by special request) an interrobang. This is the first time I’ve (helped) make a font. The licence is currently Creative Commons cc-by-nc, copyright Riordon Turner.

Sample:

Thank you to everyone who tested version 1. Do you think we should place it on Open Font Library, or what do you think we should do next?

(Comments are welcome, as are suggestions for version 3. Rio is enjoying reading your feedback so far.)

I’ve had an affinity for the card called The Fool for a long time.  This Christmas, Fin commissioned Joanna Barnum to paint me as the archetype, along with my late dog Jaspie:

© Joanna Barnum 2008.  Isn’t it wonderful?  You should all go and look at the gallery of her other work.

An idea which occurred to me just now:  What if there was a drop-in replacement for the gettext library which took the locale name from a GConf key rather than the environment?  Then when you chose a new locale, all the apps would know about it, and we could unmap and re-map all their windows and they’d all appear in the new language immediately.  There’s no reason you should have to restart an app just to change the language.

…why not? :)

Posts around the solstice:

• How to turn on compositing without using the gconf tools
• Is there a good way to allow arbitrary titlebar buttons to be defined?
• In particular, should there be a titlebar button to shrink apps to the notification area?
• a roundup of all current bugs for your feedback (out of date as soon as it’s posted, of course)

All the posts have embedded audio versions.  (Maybe we should get it on itunes.)

Your feedback is always welcome.

photo of Rothko the kitten by Alex – more