Category: planet

I am much enjoying Thomas Boutell’s 5seven5, which is like twitter for haiku. Yes, I know most of them aren’t really haiku. Make an account and play with it.

A while back I wrote a post about GNOME in the Shavian alphabet. I’ve since made a Firefox extension to display pages in Shavian. It also does Unifon and Runic. Deseret is to come, and maybe Tengwar. Yes, I know there are other things I’m working on. I take breaks sometimes. You’ll have to log in to install it because it’s still marked as experimental.

On GNOME bug 561962 I have someone complaining that Metacity defines _POSIX_C_SOURCE before using POSIX functions (as you’re supposed to). He says that defining this breaks the build on OS X. Do some of you know much about POSIX on OS X and can explain to me why this should be, here or on the bug? It seems to me that if your toolchain knows about _POSIX_C_SOURCE then you’ll need it to use POSIX-only functions, and if it doesn’t it’s just another symbol. I can’t see why removing it would fix something.

Is there a way to launch gconfd to apply only to one program? The Metacity test suite needs to see whether various keystrokes work for a given binding, but I don’t want to change them in the actual host environment!

Metacity has a script called patch-wrangler where it downloads and applies a patch given the patch number, and if the patch applies cleanly builds the program for testing.

I want to make it so that you give a bug number, instead, and it will download the relevant page from Bugzilla, and then if there’s only one current patch on that bug it will grab that one.  And it will also store the name and email address of the contributor, and the comment on that patch, from the HTML, and store them into a hidden file with the patch so that the commit script can put them into ChangeLog.

But I can’t do that, because Bugzilla doesn’t show email addresses unless you’re logged in.  I would be able to do that by passing ephy’s or firefox’s cookies.txt into wget, except that nobody apparently uses cookies.txt any more and it’s all gone to sqlite.  I could fix it all up by hand but it’s a major nuisance.

Bother.

Photo by Larry He’s So Fine.

I haven’t posted for far too long.  For now, three things:

1. There is a friendly cat who rejoices in the name of Mr Cat.  He has moved in with my friends Amy and John in Maryland, not far from Baltimore and DC, but John is allergic to him.  They have neutered him and given him his shots and he is in good health.  All the no-kill shelters are full and he’s too old (four-ish) to stand much of a chance at a shelter where he might be euthanised.  Do you know anyone local who can find him a home?
2. It looks as though I’ll be in the area of the original Cambridge the week after next, in case pubmeets might be happening. :)
3. The fifth sentence of the 56th page of the closest book to me is: Bydd y llyffaint yn amadael â thi a’th dai, ac â’th weision a’th bobl, ac ni cheir hwy yn unman ond yn y Neil. The frogs will leave you and your houses and your servants and your people and will not remain(?) in any place but in the Nile.

I keep hearing people say, “If you don’t vote you have no right to complain.”

This is, of course, nonsense.  Your right to complain is inalienable, and should be exercised.  Myself, I can’t vote, being an alien, and yet I complain all the time.  Complain away.

Everyone else is going to remind you to vote if you can, I’m sure, so I presumably don’t need to.  But I do want to tell you that voting is the least you can do.  Feeding one bit of information every four years into the political machine is something, but hardly anything.  The people at Peterloo died asking for even that basic minimum, and I believe you should honour them not just by voting but by going beyond it.

I’ve been very impressed by the way Obama’s campaign have used slogans like “Yes we can”, rather than something easier like “Yes, Obama can”. Unfortunately, people seem to be reading “Yes we can” as “Yes we can… elect Barack Obama, who will then take over from us, and we can sit back and let other people run our lives from then on.”  I was disappointed that when this video says “Did you do enough?”, it means “Did you do enough to get Obama elected?” and not “Did you do enough of the sort of thing we’re actually here to do, did you feed the hungry, did you help oppressed folk find a voice, did you join a union to let your voice be heard, did you give time and resources to Habitat for Humanity or the ACLU, did you work to bring about social justice?” And I worry people have stopped seeing the election as a means to such things and just think that when their chosen candidate’s in power everything will be lovely and they can go back to sleep. However good a person he is– and I believe he is a good, even a great person– he’s not a cross between King Arthur, Jesus Christ, a Jack Kirby superhero and the mythologised version of Abe Lincoln.  If you believe he is, you will be disappointed.  One person can make mistakes: put not your trust in princes.  But you— what will you do?

I can’t vote, being an alien, even though I live here– so make sure you go in my place and the place of millions more who will be affected by this election but have no voice in it.  But more importantly, find other ways to make a change over the next four years.  Be involved.  Complain.  Make a difference.  It’s not about them, it’s about you.

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Update: Join us on #potus on irc.netgoth.org.uk.

Blessed Samhain to those who keep Samhain, and happy Halloween to those who keep Halloween.

Shortly after I made the first cup of tea of the morning, O’Keeffe presented me with a very dead mouse. It’s a clear sign of the start of winter when mice start hiding in places she can find them. I thanked her courteously and tied it up in a plastic bag to throw it away.

Later we went to the YMCA, where I had my first turn on a treadmill; I seem to have reasonable endurance but not much strength. Tomorrow they’ll be showing me how to work the weights machines and so on.

This evening Fin made chicken curry for dinner. I went out trick-or-treating with Rio. So many of the houses had signs saying to vote for one candidate or another that I said to her, “I wonder they don’t have special Barack Obama sweets.” She told me they should be called Yes We Candy. (Google tells me someone got there already, though I’m sure she didn’t know it.)

And I’m looking for translators for the new version of Joule, which might be 3.1 or 4.0. There’s not much to translate and you get your name in the footer for pages served in that language. Interested?

Yesterday was an awfully rainy and blustery day, reminiscent of the one that sent Owl to live in Piglet’s house. When I woke up there was no milk and I had to go out and get some; then I went to the Y for the first time, but I couldn’t think what to do other than track, so I did that for a mile. (Today, my legs ache, which means I should do it more often.)

Later, my body kept wishing it was back in bed and my mind wouldn’t co-operate in sympathy. But after a while suddenly things came together beautifully. In the evening Fin and Alex went instead, but when Fin and Alex left Rio in the childcare room which was always free before, the childcare people sent her away to look for them because apparently there’d been a charge of $1/hr imposed. Rio turned up crying. I am not impressed.

And I also wrote Fin a triolet:

As the drawing shall tell
and the paper responds,
some enchantment just fell,
as the drawing shall tell…
in a paper for spell
with your pencils as wands,
as the drawing shall tell
and the paper responds.

Fin made chilli for dinner. (I’ve always seen chilli in the UK and chili in the US. Isn’t it a Spanish word? Is one of them more like the Spanish?)

Someone told me I should record my day posts and post the audio file along with the text post. Maybe I should.

There will be a post about last weekend soon.

There is now a mailing list for the GNOME Latin translation. Please join it if you’re interested.

There has been a fairly impressive amount of work done already. One school has contacted the team about translating applications as a co-operation between their Latin and CS departments, so the students get to discover the details of the localisation process and sharpen their Latin skills at the same time. I’d like to see more of this kind of thing.

I know almost nothing about how KDE runs things, but their Latin translation page contains the strange note “Last update : 2004-02-27 23:40:37– Active Team.” It might be worthwhile using one team to work on both.

On Monday evening we went to the YMCA and signed up. We haven’t actually done anything there yet, but it does mean I can go swimming again. (I used to swim like a fish and I had a lifesaving qualification, but I’ve hardly been in water in five years.) To the right is the photo they took of me for my ID card. I think the moral is that I need to lose the beard after Halloween.

Later we went to the diner. Fin asked for soup. The soup had a maggot in it. The manager told her it was just a piece of cracker. This is the same diner which once served one of our party a plate of stir-fry with a fly half-fried in and struggling to get free. I think we should stop going to that diner.

O’Keeffe and Rothko have disappeared twice since I last wrote, and both times we found them hidden in a different part of the house, once under the bed in the spare room, once under a chest of drawers. Apparently this is a cat thing to move your nest every so often in case of predators, but I was really rather worried when I couldn’t find Rothko anywhere around. He’s walking around independently now, but he’s not weaned yet.

The Metacity blog is now appearing on news.gnome.org, a planet for projects. (I know some of you are going to comment saying you want it on p.g.o, but it’s not up to me.)

And I’ve saved the most interesting piece of news for last: three pieces of Fin’s art are going to be in a show between noon and 5 p.m. this coming Saturday in the Director’s Conference Room in the Luce Foundation Center at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, 8th and F Streets NW, Washington, D.C. 20004. Fin will be there, and so will the rest of us, so drop by and say hello.