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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.

Is there a guide somewhere to making a new Ubuntu langpack, one that isn’t mainstream and that can live in your PPA?  Someone asked me whether such a thing could be built for en@shaw (i.e. English written in the Shavian alphabet), and since I have tools which can convert .po files automatically I can’t see why it’d be a problem.  I don’t think Launchpad will ever want to support en@shaw as such, but I can’t see a guide anywhere to building these things– it’s clearly more than just sticking .mo files in a .deb, because something needs to create the locale and so on.  There must be some standard way!

1. Is there a simple way to have a pixbuf or pixmap or bitmap which contains two colours, and when I render it it will have one transparent and one the fully opaque colour I want?  (I would use the same image in different places in different colours– like a stamp in TuxPaint, only always monochrome).  I suppose I could use GdkPixbuf and actually modify the pixel data before I output it (if transparent, leave it; else set to desired colour), but is there a more elegant way?
2. What’s the name of that program that draws a graph of another program’s startup time (and has nothing to do with valgrind)?  You know, it makes one tall column representing the passage of time, and coloured lines coming out at angles telling you what happened when.

Happy birthday to John, who is wonderful.

Yesterday was not the most productive day. First of all, I overslept, and when I woke up I found it didn’t matter so much because the heavy snow had brought the net connection down and there was no bugzilla or IRC. So I hung around the house a lot and didn’t do much, although I did find a way to save a quarter of the time it takes to register a window’s properties. On the other hand, that’s only an average of 44μs saved. On the gripping hand, it makes the code cleaner. Anyway, a friendly bloke from Comcast just turned up and climbed the telegraph pole to fix it, so we’re all back and lovely.

I was also so annoyed at the CPAN module Lingua::Phoneme requiring a database installed even just to test it that I rewrote it using Berkeley DB. It turns out to be less portable than I thought, but Adam Kennedy has explained to me three ways this can be fixed, so I’ll get on that soonish.

Someone bought me a copy of Gareth King’s Intermediate Welsh Grammar addressed to “Thomas Happy Birthday Thurman”. Thank you, whoever you are, and I would like to know who you are!

Fin has been painting watercolours of Katie and other people: Katie in a corset, Katie again, Sandra, and bifemmefatale.

Someone I know who is friendly has started an interesting blog about Bolivian politics.

“No, honestly”, said God, “I really do want you to play Free Bird.”

And finally, Nerd Merit Badges. There should totally be a GNOME badge.

This is your semi-regular reminder that you should all be following the Metacity blog if you want to know what’s going on in the Metacity world. (Some people want to know why the Metacity blog isn’t on Planet GNOME.  It’s because Planet GNOME is for people, not projects.  It does appear on GNOME News. I know some of you have said there should be an exception, or something like that, but I’m not the person to complain to.)

Yesterday I posted an idea about getting down to zero bugs in the tracker by this time next year.  It could be sooner, if we have more help.  Many of the existing bugs are squibs, or “why don’t you add this feature to Metacity?” bugs, and rather than just saying “no” to a bunch of these myself, I’ve decided that for the next few weeks we’ll post about one squib a day for you to argue over.  This is not an election and the maintainers still have final say, but your opinions are always interesting.  The first two have already been posted: cloning Exposé, and live previews in the alt-tab switcher.

And there’s also all the other regular features about current issues in window management, blue sky ideas, letters pages and the Metacity Journal, which is produced by a script and then hand-edited.  I may make the script public when I’m a bit more sure of its stability.  Would your project like to use it?

Photo © Trepelu, cc-by-nc-nd.