My walk was the walk of a human child, but my heart was a tree.

...and a sonnet for Katie.  There was so much I had to leave out of this one...

Do you recall the day when there were two?
I know it's rather easy to forget
the day when there was Me and there was You,
instead of Us, the day before we met?
It's shadowed, for the memories are bright:
in each, we find a unifying theme,
I join a shining sun within her light,
you join a dreamer deep within a dream.
   The day you spoke the love you hold for me!
   You hugged me, like a jet plane when it lands!
   The evening when we kissed beneath the tree;
   The nights of candlelight and gentle hands;
and millions more to come, repeating thus:
each moment makes of you and me an Us.

Written for Fin, because I miss zir very much.

My health needs are few,
but water comes first.
I tell you, it's true.
My health needs are few,
And water is you.
I'm aching with thirst.
My health needs are few
but water comes first.

ebassi's talk on the state of Clutter:

0.8 was released at Guadec '08.  Then they were bought by Intel.  0.9 release came in July.

Got more complicated because people other than them are using Clutter now and they have to check bug reports etc.  1.0 is imminent.

What's changed in 1.0?

• Performance
• API consolidation
• New animation stuff

So:

• API will be stable for two years (until 2.0)
• Minimal amount of API.
• Full documentation

I am sitting in the foyer of the auditorium hacking and waiting for the next talk, which is on GNOME Shell, something I have a particular interest in. Just to show you how close everything is to the sea here, this is the view from where I'm sitting.

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.

I've got a giant cardboard box, what could we make out of it?
One of my siblings, when they were a toddler, had a giant cardboard box and called it "Harold the Fishing Boat".  When it was taken away, they complained that it had been their favourite friend.

Do you hang your clothes in your closet, all facing in the same direction?
No.  I keep them in drawers.

Why would the F.B.I. be after you?
I hope they're not: it would be very inconvenient for everyday life.

Apart from a car license, do you have a license for anything else?
I don't have a "car licence".  I don't actually have a licence for anything.

The new law is: Everyone must have a word tattooed on their forehead, what's yours going to be?
"Civil disobedience".

Are you any different than you were a year ago?
I hope so.

Everybody has a little "what" in them?
...one million Hows, two million Wheres, and seven million Whys.

Are you a talker or are you a listener?
I am a talker.  Telnet to me!

What do you shake?
Milk.

What is the one thing you know is true?
λxy.x

What do you do when you sit out on your deck or porch alone?
Walk around twiddling pipecleaners and designing systems.

What would make it a better day where you are right now?
Nothing, it's night.

Okay, bored of this, and I have other things to do.  May do some more later.  (Fin's answers are here.)

Briefly, since I'm busy:

Since it was a fairly trivial fix, I implemented a two-stage system in Joule last night, as suggested here: there's just a username box on the front page, and it takes you to an intermediate page where you pick the service.  Most people bookmark their chart page and don't use the controls, and I was aiming to make the controls simpler even at the possible cost of a few extra seconds for a first-time user.  I'm asking for feedback for or against this idea.  I've only heard one reply so far and they didn't like it.  What do you think?

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.

Some things that could be done to Joule, mainly for my own reference.  Not in order. I've shown the amount of work needed; I haven't ascribed an importance to any of these (though I wouldn't mind hearing your opinions).

1. Joule is case-sensitive.  None of the systems it serves data from are case-sensitive.  This is silly.  This will probably require downtime to fix, because effective duplicates will need to be removed from the database. Medium
2. The translation system needs a radical overhaul.  I have several ideas.  In particular, the English text should be placed within the templates, as with gettext, and not within a magic .po file; and ?lang=fr etc should be pages, not redirects, for the benefit of search engines.  Complex
3. Controls overhaul. Easy
4. Look into OpenSocial so we can chart Blogger and MySpace. Medium
5. There should be a table of messages of the day.  The HTML pages should show the most recent, and the RSS feeds should show whichever was the most recent on the relevant day.  This will let us put interesting messages about new features into RSS feeds, which is the only way to contact most of our users. Medium
6. joulestats is stable and can be run from cron: done.  Also, fix joulestats's messages for users with zillions of followers; they're less helpful than they could be. Easy
7. Page view per day so that massive charts become at least slightly useful. Medium
8. Add an extra column showing the total number of followers on each day, for the same reason.  This needs a current count to be returned from the XS and then we just add and subtract as we go down the line. Easy
9. The FAQ needs to be broken out into separate pages. Easy
10. Dreamwidth support, when this enhancement is finished. Easy
11. Most of the Twitter and identi.ca work needs to be done in a superclass rather than duplicating code. Easy
12. I would like a way to draw line graphs of number of followers over time.  (This is blocked by "controls overhaul".) Complex

I have a ton of other stuff to do, so Joule only gets worked on now and then.  But feel free to advocate for any particular one of these.  Also, feel free to send patches or to ask for help making them.  And I'd like to hear any other suggestions you have.

Are there any words you can't stand the sound of?
No, not really.  I think each word has its own special beauty and is useful in its own place.  I don't have the revulsion to words like moist that some people claim to have.  Even a word like phthisis (presumably the source of "phtheezles" in Christopher Robin), though a name for a horrible thing, has its own strange beauty as a word.

If you are a colour, which colour are you?
Orange on some days, black on others.

What is your comfort food?
Hm.  In this country, gummy bears and milk chocolate.  In England, probably jelly babies, pickled onions, licorice allsorts, softgrain bread, and milk chocolate.
                                                                                                                              
Do you consider yourself comfortable in your own skin?
Not really.  I tend to think it's rather ugly skin, covered with plaque as it is.  But a friend of mine took some pictures of it to show me it could be beautiful, and sometimes I look at them in order to remember.
                                                                                                                              
Tell me something true.
The Scottish parliament has the legal ability under the Scotland Act to raise or lower income tax by 3%.  This is theoretically called the Tartan Tax, but the power has never been used.  (I'm not sure whether this is the sort of thing you were looking for.)

"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".

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.

Poll #1422485 Suggestions
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: None

How can I improve? (As a person, as a blogger...) What should I change?

Ryan Tucker reported a bug in Joule. When a user has more than 5,000 followers, on some days Joule will throw a database error about a duplicate key. This is mysterious, since the keys come from a hash and should be unique. I thought I'd try liveblogging fixing it, in case anyone wanted to watch.  Times are EST.

• 18:30: Can we replicate it in staging?  I don't want to bring the real Joule down while I look for a fix.
• 18:39: Yes, astronautics on Twitter has >5,000 followers and causes Joule to exhibit the bug.
• 18:44: Okay, Joule is instrumented so it will dump the old and new lists to a file, plus what it thinks the changes are.
• 18:45: It failed again and I have the log file.  Good!  I hate when you set up debugging and it suddenly starts working.
• 18:48: Well, it's not because there are duplicates in the old or the new lists, so it must be a comparison error.
• 19:01: Fascinating.  The new version of the comparison code is reporting one of the userids as both added and removed, which the DB constraints obviously won't allow.  This didn't come up in testing...
• 19:24: Seems that when you have two users A and B, and A's name is a prefix of B's, and A unfriends you, that the system gets confused and reports B having both friended and unfriended you.  Fixing now.
• 19:31: I think I have a solution.  Taking out all the instrumentation to test it.
• 19:36: Tests pass.  So do old tests.  Will write a regression test in a few minutes.
• 19:37: The moment of truth... yes!  it works on staging.  Rolling out to production.
• 19:52: Fix checked in and in production.  The remaining problem here is that astronautics had 3064 follows and 2421 unfollows, and Joule is fixed so that it shows "Hiccup" if you have more than 100 on the same day (for three reasons; I could tell you, but does anyone care?)  Suggestions for working around this one are welcome.

If anyone cares, the three reasons for "Hiccup" are:

1. We have to do a separate lookup in Twitter for every userid we haven't seen before, to get the icon and username.  For 5000 changes in a day, that slows page load times a lot.  This is still a problem.
2. There is an old pre-Twitter assumption that 100 follows or unfollows means either that Joule broke, or that LJ broke when it sent us the names.  Clearly this is outdated.
3. There isn't enough space in the chart for more than a few hundred names a day without making the page insanely long.

Carmen has suggested replacing "Hiccup" with a link to a sub-page which displays all the names for that day, possibly allowing paging through them to get around the first problem I mentioned.  I think this is a very useful idea.

A meme from kjpepper and justkimu.  They gave me five words that they associate with me and asked me to talk about them.

hair: I always used to wear my hair fairly long even as a kid, but I last had my hair properly cut in January 2000.  I like the feel of my hair; it's one of the things I actually rather like about my body.  But perhaps if I ever start going bald I may shave it all off like Stuart Davis.

English: Do you mean the nationality or the language?  I love playing with the language.  As for the nationality, I met a deaf person a while ago and realised that they were the first person I'd met in six years who didn't immediately pigeonhole me because of the island on which I was born (so of course I tried to tell them anyway).

Fin: Not just my life partner, but also my inspiration.

messy: Interesting choice of word.  I could probably make money selling books on how messiness should be accepted as a way of life and a challenge, the way people do for change.

poly: I love many people.  Apparently this is not the default and needs a label.

England: already had this one.  I was born there, I love going back, I miss it very much.

livejournal: I have had one since fairly early on (I was one of the first 50,000) and for only the second time in my life, keeping a diary has since become part of my self.  (And it's been a privilege to play a small part in LJ culture.)

tree(s): trees are important to the planet because they refresh the air, and to me because they have the same effect on my mind.  And they are just as important to people I love, which makes them doubly and trebly important to me.

naps: why did you include that?  I don't take naps.

language: a lifelong obsession of mine, in very many ways.

test: test?!

You should feel free to give me five words to talk about, or ask for five words of your own.

You might have discovered by now that I'm rather a fan of the Shavian alphabet. That doesn't mean I'm entirely uncritical of its design. Here are some of my gripes:

1. Most of the letters are visually distinct enough. But 𐑓 and 𐑝 (f and v) are too similar to 𐑐 and 𐑚 (p and b), to which they are unrelated.  Likewise for the vowels 𐑩 uh 𐑨 a 𐑧 e 𐑪 o:  they are far too similar to one another, especially when handwritten.
2. Similarly 𐑯 and 𐑥 (n and m) are too similar when handwritten to the rather rare vowels 𐑷 and 𐑭 (awe and ah).
3. Since most Americans merge 𐑷 and 𐑪 anyway, and some merge both with 𐑭, we could avoid the previous problem simply: just write them all as 𐑪 and be done with it. I don't believe this merger causes the Americans to have trouble understanding one another. (And Shavian does without a character for wh already, presumably because mergers have brought it to extinction in most dialects of English.)
4. The rule about pairing off voiced and unvoiced consonants is a good one. But 𐑘 and 𐑢 (y and w) bear no relation to one another and shouldn't be paired.
5. In the same way, it's perhaps not unreasonable to pair 𐑙 and 𐑣 (ng and h) since these sounds occur in opposition. But they should probably have been written the other way up, since 𐑙 is now the only voiced tall letter.
6. All the ligatures, 𐑸 ar, 𐑹 or, 𐑼 uhr, 𐑺 air, 𐑽 ear, 𐑻 err, and especially 𐑾 ia and 𐑿 yu were a mistake (though it's nice to be able to write "𐑲♥𐑿"). People would already run screaming from an alphabet with forty letters; there's no call to add eight more redundant ones. Even Shaw Script didn't use them, though that's because they're too wide for a typewritten character.
7. The naming dot (𐑥𐑸𐑒 is mark, ·𐑥𐑸𐑒 is Mark) is a nuisance for automated transliteration, though I understand that this was less of a big deal in 1960. It doesn't add much that's useful.  The caselessness of Shavian is a strength, and this seems to be a concession to case.
8. The Alphabet Trust marketed it in the wrong way (though this wasn't really their fault, since the money was taken away). What they should have done, even before printing Androcles, is sponsored classes across the country in institutes of further education. (They were legally obliged to print Androcles under the terms of the will, and they did a good job with it. It was the right decision to print it rather than produce a facsimile of calligraphy.)
9. They should also have produced a standard lexicon so that people could look up the Shavian transliteration of any common word in the Latin alphabet. The lack of such a lexicon made adoption much harder.
10. Shaw wanted the script to represent English as spoken in the North, yet Androcles standardised on RP spelling throughout.
11. Also, whoever transliterated Androcles was not as enlightened as the alphabet's designer. In particular they represent syllabic consonants with a leading schwa: "battle" is transliterated 𐑚𐑨𐑑𐑩𐑤 and not 𐑚𐑩𐑑𐑤 as you might reasonably expect.
12. The designer of Shavian, Kingsley Read, conducted a large number of trials after Shavian was released, and produced a new script called Quikscript (also known as "Second Shaw"). It was based on Shavian, but with fixes for the problems identified by the trials.  Such a large-scale trial should really have been done before Shavian was ever launched.

Yet I'm not calling for Shavian to be abandoned (more than it already is) and a new alphabet to be started like Kingsley Read's or others.  There's little enough life in the trunk, and branches would wither immediately.  Whatever problems Shavian may have, the conventional spelling is a thousand times worse. And once you have a well-known and fairly standard form like Shavian, which anyone can read about in the history of spelling reform and which is in both ISO 15924 and Unicode, I like to stick to it unless there's a really compelling reason not to.  As a parallel, Esperanto may have been a failure as a constructed world language, but it still has around a million speakers.  How many speakers can its various reforms boast?

This is the knowledge meme. You can find the rules here, if you haven't seen them yet.

My list, for now (there may be things I'm forgetting):

- Formal verse, especially sonnets.
- Heraldry and vexillology. I used to be the president of my university heraldry society.
- Linguistics, to some extent. Very little formal training other than half a master's degree in computational linguistics.
- I have passable HTML and CSS skills.
- I know a fair amount about several failed systems to reform English spelling.
- I am actually pretty good at programming in C, Python, and Perl, and to a slightly lesser extent in about a dozen other languages.
- There are perhaps a few hundred people in the world who know as much or more about window managers than I do.

BLT:

1) Fix this bug.

2) And this bug.

3) Make BLT not depend on XML any more. This will increase both speed and portability.

DateTime::Calendar::Liturgical::Christian:

1) Fix this bug about the start of Advent.

2) Add Year 1 / Year 2 calculation. (Easiest to have a method which returns the current year, *or* the year plus one if we're in Advent, and then write it in terms of that.)

3) Putting both the main and the Office lectionaries into the calendar would be a nice touch (the main starts on page 888, and the Office starts on page 934, of this copy of the BCP. Conversion to some kind of XML-ish format, or pure Perl, would be a reasonably simple job.)

A question to BLT users: If I changed the format of the settings file, would you want it to upgrade automatically, or would you be okay with typing your username and password in again?

Things people asked on the "ask me something that should be obvious" post:

Where do you work? I work for a British open source consulting firm called Collabora.

Who are you currently dating? FSVO "dating": I don't really do dates as such. My partners are firinel, plexq, xugglybug, who are all lovely and wonderful people.

"The problem with Livejournal is that we all think we are so close, but really, we know nothing about each other. Hence, I want you to ask me something you think you should know about me. Something that should be obvious, but you have no idea about. Then post this in your LJ and find out what people don't know about you."

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