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Part one: There are several interesting discussions currently going on on the Metacity blog, including the development of optional and experimental subsystems for CSS theming and window matching, and whether applications should be able to extend the window menu (so if you have Istanbul installed, you could add Screencast this window to all windows.) Hop over and add your two penn’orth.

Part two: I don’t know any good content management systems. “Good” here means:

• easy for the end user to use (which is not usually me)
• without continual security holes
• not requiring MySQL
• if possible, not requiring PHP; Perl or Python would be lovely.

Moveable Type goes some way towards being “good”, but my complete blog is so large that it takes three quarters of an hour to publish it in static mode, and the dynamic mode appears to require weird and clunky PHPisms. I have worked around this to some extent by using MT’s rather nice dashboard, but turning off dynamic publishing, and writing a simple but fairly powerful mod_perl system called Plough which produces dynamic content by reading out of the database of a MT installation and running the results through Template Toolkit. Several of the sites I look after now use this system. I rather like it, but it’s not really ideal: MT requires me to keep the static files around anyway, and they waste space.  Maybe there are better answers out there.

Part three: This blog’s syndication is in a bit of a mess. It currently exists in four places:

• LiveJournal, here, where it started. Archives are here going back to 2001.
• Dreamwidth, here— but not everything has been imported from LJ.
• GNOME Blogs, here— generally the same content as LJ, but not entirely. This is what is syndicated to Planet GNOME.
• marnanel.org, here— again, not exactly the same content, but all public entries from LJ have been imported (although the comments haven’t). This is what is syndicated to Planet Collabora.  It’s powered by Plough, of course.

I update the blog by writing it on Dreamwidth, letting Dreamwidth syndicate the content to LJ, and then copying it manually to GNOME Blogs and marnanel.org.  I’m okay with this as syndication, but I think it would be good if I had fewer things to update.  I’d quite like everything to end up on marnanel.org, for the increased control over styling and the googlejuice; I might perhaps write a script which updates marnanel.org and GNOME Blogs according to what’s new in Dreamwidth’s RSS.

Part four: I am still planning to write up GCDS, but this is not that post.

Part five: It has been mentioned that I don’t blog about GNOME much any more, and that this is possibly not ideal for Planet GNOME.  This happens because almost all my GNOME hacking involves Metacity, and of course that goes on the Metacity blog; I only mention here what I’ve already written there.  If you have suggestions to fix this, please let me know!  (Before you ask, the Metacity blog can’t go on Planet GNOME; it’s not allowed.)

In news unrelated to blogging, my temperature has reached 99.6°F (38°C) and I feel rather awful. I hope I feel better tomorrow.

The future of… the Metacity project, Metacity’s bug list, and the Metacity blog, all with respect to the advent of Mutter. I thought some people who don’t usually read the Metacity blog but read planet might be interested.  Comment there, or if you’re at GUADEC, come and find me in meatspace.

First off, I want to thank Google for giving out water bottles.  This morning I forgot my lanyard with the name badge on it, and had to walk for forty minutes in the sun to the hotel and back.  Google, you made it much less unpleasant than it could have been.  Also, Nokia gave us towels and USB keys, and Intel are giving us coffee and ice-cream every day.

The flight to Las Palmas was delayed yesterday, and we missed some of the opening talks– apparently RMS was singing.  But we arrived in time for the lightning talks; I heard one on refactoring, one on KDE’s triage team (which sounds like a great idea), one on improving OCR in Linux, and some others.  Later I went back to the hotel and slept while other people were eating (my choice: I was quite horribly jetlagged) and then we all ended up on the roof talking about tech stuff until about midnight, when we dispersed.

There was a sign up saying “Don’t try to upgrade your system: there are 700 of us here.”  The network has been getting a little overloaded.  I’m now sitting in a talk about Bluetooth.  People keep trying to pair with the speaker’s devices.

I will take some pictures and post them.  I haven’t seen any actual canaries here, but perhaps I haven’t been looking hard enough.

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?