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It’s been a rather good weekend. Today Amy and John came over and we spent most of the day wandering around the town. We went to a bookshop where there turned out to be a signing by a local author called Tamera Lawrence who had just written her first book. I talked to her for a bit and she told me that the important thing is to write every day: I think this is good advice and since I won’t be able to spend spare time on the Welsh course after all it seems a good thing to put some hours into. Anyway, Rio found herself some books, and then we went to a comic shop where she bought herself an Emily the Strange comic. Later we went home and played Mao: Rio is a formidable opponent and won three against my one. I really am very proud of her. Then we went to the diner and had dinner together and played Apples to Apples.

I’ve also built the first version of a unit test suite for Metacity. There’s only the one test at the moment (for reparenting) but it’s scriptable so it’ll be less difficult to add more tests as we go along. Next I want to test all the keypresses and as many GConf keys as possible. (Whoever had the idea about including a private DBus daemon was absolutely correct. Thank you.)

I am very excited that we might get a project-wide DVCS, even if it’s not the one I voted for.

I am writing unit tests for Metacity. One of the things I want to be able to test is the response to various GConf settings. I am not seeing any easy way of running a per-process GConf server. Is there an easy way of doing this?

One alternative might be to add an optional bit of code to read .ini files and ignore GConf when one was specified. The prefs code in Metacity is modular enough that this wouldn’t be difficult. It might even be more generally useful: Metacity is buildable without GConf for use in embedded systems, but it uses all defaults and isn’t configurable.

Is this good as a hackergotchi?

If not, what needs to change?

Yesterday was a good day; I got a lot done, Alex took us out to eat, and things were good. I think perhaps I slept badly last night because today I’ve been feeling rather out of it all day. I did remember to pay the mortgage at lunchtime, and I got a chance to cook in the evening (I made spag bol). I was talking to Lampeter University about doing (part time distance learning) Welsh courses with them, and it all seemed possible but it turns out that of course they charge quite a bit more if you live overseas. And it’s raining like a rather enthusiastic power shower out there, only a lot colder (I just went out in it to buy milk). Blah.

“And when Bagpuss was asleep, all his friends were asleep.
The mice were ornaments on the mouse organ.
Gabriel and Madeleine were just dolls.
Professor Yaffle was just an old wooden bookend in the shape of a woodpecker.
Even Bagpuss himself, once he was asleep,
was just an old, saggy cloth cat–
baggy, and a bit loose at the seams.

But Emily loved him.”

Yesterday we went down to Philly and Fin got herself a tattoo at No Ka Oi. On the way some guy appeared and started asking me (in rhyme) whether I would buy his hiphop album. (Fin, to me: “But you don’t even listen to hiphop.” Me: “I do sometimes. Specially if it’s in Welsh.”) I had lost the captive bead of my nose ring while I’d been away: I’d tried to put it back and dropped it, and heard it bouncing away for ever along the floor. I went over to Infinite and asked them to put another one in, which they did, but there was such a queue that I missed most of the tattooing, which I was rather sad about. I was reading Ender’s Game while I waited and didn’t realise how much time had passed. When I came back they were pretty much done. We didn’t get to go to the Shoe, nor did we get to go and eat somewhere, because it was getting late and the snow was coming on quite thickly. So we went home, and Fin unveiled her tattoo. I think it’s lovely, and I wish I could get some of my own (the psoriasis makes it impossible).

And a link for you: The weather forecast, chanted.

Current music: Super Furry Animals – Y Gwyneb Iau (I am amused that that could mean both “liver-face” and “the surface of Jupiter”)
Photo © MikeLeone, cc-by-nc-nd.

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.