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

Day: Woke up, went to the gym, came back, worked, and plexq made us some rather good quesadillas.  Fin made some lovely tag icons for marnanel.org to go along with the existing ones from rosequoll.

Theming: I would like to re-examine the Metacity theme format for GNOME 3.  To this end, I've been working on CSS theming for Metacity.  I have a reasonable first pass at it written, and several of the standard themes converted (and several more to do).  But it occurs to me that the people who would like to create themes and the people who would be willing to download and compile several experimental libraries are not necessarily the same.  To this end, I've created a wiki to demonstrate the system.  If you write CSS on a page whose name begins with Borders: it will display as the result of rendering that CSS.  There is a tour, which you should take first.

Please feel free to create your own themes, either from scratch or by making copies of the existing ones.  I was going to finish off all the sample themes before announcing this, and also to make a theme wizard that would put together a theme for you from parts (to show how the system is well-adapted to use with editors), but I decided it was better to release early, release often.

Of course, now that I've announced this, it's sure to be vandalised; I'll try to keep an eye on it, but if you could revert any vandalism you see, I'd appreciate it.  Let me know what you think of the system, either way.

Top fives: Ask me for my top five favourites of anything and I'll try to give a sensible answer.  So far I've been asked for cities, words, puddings, foods, beverages, heresies, books, and Tetris shapes.  Since there are only seven Tetris shapes, that's rather an easy question: the answer is all of them except "S" and "Z".

Rio and I went for a walk and found a lost dog without a collar.  While we were walking it around, it went to a house and sat outside it, so we decided it must belong there.

We all had a good long talk with Katie on IM tonight.  It was so good to see her face again.

I should make an OKCupid test called "What kind of formal verse are you?"

My referrer logs indicate that I am the fourth Google image search hit for "naked dancing", though the page was not actually about naked dancing at all (it was about psoriasis, and I was complaining that it made my skin hurt where my clothes touched it, and that I therefore envied anyone who could dance about naked).

I have decided that the Yarrow-ification of my blog has been a success.  You can read individual entries, years, months, random articles, or tags and subtags.  I still need to get it to syndicate stuff off my Dreamwidth journal, but that's not far away.  (Do note that the skin won't be the same when it's all done: it just has the standard Yarrow skin at present.)  It's been so successful for me that I wonder whether other people would be interested in using it.

I am feeling very, very tired tonight.

Rio and I spent a good while today playing with Alice.  We made a table with a button which, if pressed, would cause a yellow chicken to fly over and spin around.  For her bedtime story I read her the first chapter of The Phoenix and the Carpet.

I should reiterate that, as I said at the time, I myself don't think using WebKit in the window manager sounds like a good idea.  Since someone had raised the idea, I thought it was worth discussing, and now it certainly has been discussed.

I was trying to typeset some of my work the other day (for some reason), and I noticed how odd it looks to set sonnets in a sans-serif font...

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.)

The weather was rather too hot on Tuesday. Wanted to go to the gym but never made it. Later we went out to eat.

Someone in Normandy made a beautiful birthday card using Riordon's font Riordon Fancy. I suggested to Rio that she could also add the Cyrillic letters to her font, and she seems quite open to the idea. I need to read up more about handwritten Cyrillic.

Ubuntu Women is holding an IRC Q&A on Wednesday evening.

Joule 3.5 (the one with Twitter and identi.ca support) went into beta. There's still one caching fix I have to make, and I have to rewrite the documentation, and fix whatever problems the testers find. I was rather sad to have to disable support for Twitterers who have tens of thousands of followers (like Neil Gaiman); the actual download and the comparison would have been fine, but the actual part where we write them all into the database made the page take several minutes to load. There is probably a more efficient way of dumping three hundred thousand rows into a database than calling a prepared statement 300,000 times, though, but I'm not sure what it is.

I don't understand why my great-grandmother wrote some of the things she wrote, and I don't agree with many of them: rather, I post them in memory of who she was. Some other people have been trying to argue with her, though, which is rather futile since she died 32 years ago.

Went to play D&D at Bae's.

Later, merged the Joule branch for doing comparisons in SQL rather than in memory on the webserver; this will make Joule faster and reduce its memory footprint, which will be necessary when Twitter support is turned on, which should be later this week. If you want to follow that, it's on twitter or on identi.ca. I'm also planning Dreamwidth support.

Rio has been watching Sita Sings the Blues over and over.

While looking through some old files, I found some of the stories I used to tell my sister when she was little. Here's the one about the lighthouse.

It was cold in the morning, though I was up early enough to see the sunlight coming through the window that faces east. I went to Parma for lunch with Fin and SaraMae and then to the gym briefly; Fin suggested I try increasing repetitions rather than weight, so I did. Later I did a little work on the Shavian wiki so that it now supports Tengwar, Deseret and Unifon as well as Shavian. I wrote a post asking for help with the tengwar but I haven't had any replies yet. We are also discussing supporting Ewellic, which reminds me that I invented a con-script of my own as a teenager to keep my diary private. I should perhaps make a post about it here, if anyone's interested.

Yesterday I received a book in the post that was written by my great-grandmother, Mary Jones, known as Nono. She would jot down her thoughts every so often and when she had a bookful she would publish them. It's sort of like 1950s Twitter. Here are some examples:

♍ Some people relax so much they can never get started again.

♍ To die— is like being invited into a beautiful, happy, loving home instead of standing lonely in the dark outside.

♍ We live and belong to England and put up with its atrocious weather and cost of living because we think we are free— but are we?

I plan to type it up and put it online. (I don't agree with everything she says, but I'd like to put it up in memory of her.) Perhaps doing it on Twitter itself would be appropriate: would any of you like to read it?

I've been feeling slightly under the weather, recently. The thunderstorm isn't helping. I hope it clears up and so does my head.

It's been good to watch the Shavian wiki grow to 14,000 words. I'm not sure what to do with it now. I have considered putting in filters so you can see the text in various other reform systems like Unifon or Deseret. I'm also considering printing the lexicon with lulu.com or similar, as a pronouncing dictionary.

We moved dorothy last night, and I think some mail may have been lost in the meantime, so if you mailed me and didn't get a reply, please mail me again.

I know some of you liked seeing pictures of Rothko the kitten, but he isn't really much of a kitten any more.

I went to the shops, and the person serving me said, "As a Welshman, I'm sure you love singing. You're a tenor, aren't you? Would you like to join our choir? We need tenors." I'm not actually Welsh, though it seems to be a common misconception. But joining the choir could be fun.

Some people take not just the poem but even the formatting.

As to names of computers: currently our naming scheme is saints (Dorothy Day is at least on the canonisation track). Previously, it was colours (green, spectrum, charcoal, lavender, haematite). When I lived alone before I moved here, it was characters from Njal's saga. There was njal, and bergthora, and hrut, which was an enormous tower that didn't fit anywhere.

I am trying to write more. I don't always think the results are very good.

A ghost complains about blackberries


And I have nothing else to do again
But walk these halls and wish I wasn't here,
But picking berries in a country lane.
A shadow is my face, the dust my brain,
My voice is but an echo in your ear.
And I have nothing else to do again
But counting every pace to keep me sane.
Dead as I am, I've nothing else to fear.
But, picking berries in a country lane;
Within me lives the spectre of a pain,
The ache of endless summer, yesteryear,
And I have nothing else to do again
But live in memory without my chain
And walk an aimless autumn Cambridgeshire...
But picking berries in a country lane.

Each universe must reach its long refrain.
A moment all my chains must disappear
And I'll have nothing else to do again
But picking berries in a country lane.

Today we went to the Franklin Institute with Bae and the rest of the D&D group. There was a really rather interesting presentation on the history of the telescope, and an exhibition about Narnia which was a bit dull. Afterwards I was quite sad to find that my favourite Indian restaurant in Philly had closed permanently.

I went to H&R Block today to get our taxes done. I gave myself quite a headache doing it. Afterwards I went to the gym and worked out a bit, then walked back home, but everyone was out so I went to Subway and bought lunch. Today hasn't been wonderfully productive other than that.

I think the Journal of the Simplified Spelling Society is no longer publishing, which is a shame, because if it was I'd write them a paper about the Shavian wiki from a spelling reform point of view rather than from a computational linguistics point of view.

I was only asked two questions on that question meme:

1. What's your phone number? I have lost the charger, so nobody can phone me, I'm afraid.
2. Have you ever had poetry or prose published? Sort of. I wrote a poem at the age of about nine that was published in Puffin Post-- I won a copy of one of the Wizard of Oz books for that. And I had a few sonnets printed in the local church magazine. Other than that, not really. Soberly and without false humility, I don't really think anyone wants to pay to read what I write: formal verse is unfashionable.

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.

-6°C today. I walked ~5km in this weather to the gym and back; I hardly needed to work out after that. (No way was I leaving there straight after a shower.) Fin made lunch and it was lovely; not much else happened except that Riordon discovered interactive fiction, and so I received this IM:

riordon: hello
riordon: I love you
riordon: <3
marnanel: <3 I love you too
riordon: can you makeit so i can play on zork

(Zork this way →)

Today it's been a bit quiet since Katie left. I washed up, and went to the gym for the first time since Christmas, and was quite surprised that I could still lift the same amounts of weights as before. I put on a stone over the holidays, so I need to work that off. I made dinner tonight: it was pierogies and beans. Also, I made the first post for a while on the Metacity blog. I upgraded to Jaunty but this seems to have broken the mp3 player. I also spent a while installing bip; most of the time was spent fighting the hashing algorithm which didn't like some of the funny characters I had in the password I originally chose. I don't know why it doesn't just require you to make the file unreadable by anyone else and store the password in plaintext like pidgin does-- or at most use md5.