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

A few things which have happened recently:

• Katie arrived to spend some time here with us. It's wonderful having her here again.
• I've been spending some time preparing a discussion of CSS window border theming which I'm hoping to run at the Boston summit.
• I posted a screencast of robotfindskitten on the N900.
• We went to Hawk Mountain today with Amy and John.
• When we were there, I gave Amy her birthday present, which was a book I wrote for her. It's the story of a scholar whose studies are interrupted when her library books are stolen by a dragon. You can read the first chapter here, if you like.

Many of you will not find this interesting, and that's okay.

A few weeks ago, Davyd made the suggestion that window borders should be entirely stylable using CSS. I thought this was a wonderful idea and wrote some code around it.

Then it occurred to me that the people who would most enjoy playing with CSS theming are not necessarily the same people who are willing to compile a test program and a bunch of libraries. So I made a wiki. On this wiki, you enter some CSS into a page, and the system turns it into window borders and shows it on the finished page.

That was the easy part. However, I now have to port all the major themes to CSS in order to demonstrate the system before I make it public. So far I have about six of fourteen ported. Also, in so doing I'm uncovering lots of bugs in my initial implementation. So it might be a week or so before it goes public.

However, if any of you enjoy writing CSS and think styling window borders is interesting, I'd be interested to have your help. Let me know.

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...

Background: what a window is (basic X stuff)
When you're in GDK you never see all this stuff, because it wraps it.  You see widgets instead.  But some widgets have multiple windows and some have no windows (GTK_NO_WINDOW) because they draw in their parent widget's window.

So, client side windows.  Only use X windows for toplevel.  Subwindows are emulated.

Why?

• No flicker, because you never see a partially-drawn widget. (Demonstration.  Spontaneous applause.)
• Smarter redrawing; less copying.
• Easier to work across platforms (no X-specific stuff for X and so on).  Much simplified.  (more applause)
• Bling: you can do rotation and stuff (more applause).
• More bling: crazy clutter stuff that bounces around while you're working on it.  "This is clearly not like a useful user interface" :)

Clientside will be default, except for toplevels.  There is a call you can use to force a window to be native.
How does it work?  Lots of clever stuff about emulating events.  "Sounds easy but it's not".

Merged to git master already; X11 working fine; Win32 being written.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I posted a while ago about a little hack to make GNOME applications display in the Shavian alphabet. It occured to me a while later that it would be worthwhile to know how to make a new language pack, and running the filter over the localisations of all the apps in Ubuntu would be a fun way to do this, so there'd be an en@Shaw langpack that would also include some fonts and the SCIM keyboard mapping.

This morning, I woke up with the idea that since "Ubuntu" contains the same vowel three times, the logo would have to look like this:



End silly.

Apparently you can now adopt a hacker, including me, for $10 a month (which I don't get, the Foundation gets it, and I assume it's tax-deductible in the US). I have to send you postcards. I may also send you cake if anyone does. (You also get a shirt, but from the Foundation, not me.)

Probably most of you don't use Metacity, but I value your feedback whether or not you do. I was publicly wondering yesterday which half-finished bit of coding should be polished up and made ready for prime time, and Fin suggested I make an LJ poll. If you don't use Metacity, pretend you do, and score things as 10 if you'd like to see them ASAP and 1 if you don't care:

Poll #1329722 Not that I set my priorities via LiveJournal polls, but
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 20

A test suite

Window matching (apps stay where you put them)

A theme editor

Actions (anything you can bind a keystroke to you can bind double-click titlebar to, or a titlebar button, or...)

Reduce the memory footprint

I'd be interested to see your justifications, if you'd like to comment with them.

I am amused that after I called the Metacity blog "...for the adult in you", after Havoc's quip about Metacity being plain as Cheerios, the authors of the new GNOME theming blog have named it "...for the child in you".

On Monday evening we went to the YMCA and signed up. We haven't actually done anything there yet, but it does mean I can go swimming again. (I used to swim like a fish and I had a lifesaving qualification, but I've hardly been in water in five years.) To the right is the photo they took of me for my ID card. I think the moral is that I need to lose the beard after Halloween.

Later we went to the diner. Fin asked for soup. The soup had a maggot in it. The manager told her it was just a piece of cracker. This is the same diner which once served one of our party a plate of stir-fry with a fly half-fried in and struggling to get free. I think we should stop going to that diner.

O'Keeffe and Rothko have disappeared twice since I last wrote, and both times we found them hidden in a different part of the house, once under the bed in the spare room, once under a chest of drawers. Apparently this is a cat thing to move your nest every so often in case of predators, but I was really rather worried when I couldn't find Rothko anywhere around. He's walking around independently now, but he's not weaned yet.

The Metacity blog is now appearing on news.gnome.org, a planet for projects. (I know some of you are going to comment saying you want it on p.g.o, but it's not up to me.)

And I've saved the most interesting piece of news for last: three pieces of Fin's art are going to be in a show between noon and 5 p.m. this coming Saturday in the Director’s Conference Room in the Luce Foundation Center at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, 8th and F Streets NW, Washington, D.C. 20004. Fin will be there, and so will the rest of us, so drop by and say hello.

I've been writing a thing recently called (𐑜)𐑯𐑴𐑥 𐑦𐑯 𐑞 ·𐑖𐑱𐑝𐑳𐑯 𐑩𐑤𐑓𐑳𐑚𐑧𐑑, or: Doing apparently silly things in GNOME which might actually prove useful. You can read it if you like. You can even offer criticism and suggestions.

(crossposted: here and on planet)

Life: I was so tired after work last night that I fell asleep in the guest room at about nine o'clock. I still feel rather tired-- I don't know whether sleeping on my own for once meant that I slept more deeply-- but I do remember my dreams, which I normally never do. Perhaps that's a good sign in general, but I did have to put up with their being nightmares. First I dreamed about having to sit an important exam, and even though I'd studied hard I still knew nothing about the subject. It was pretty horrible, and I was very relieved when I woke, but then I fell asleep and dreamed about being in England and journeying down to see my parents. The journey was disastrous, and then when I got there, instead of being pleased to see me they were angry I'd been away for so long as though they'd been expecting me back after school and I hadn't returned for six years.

It's autumn here. I love the autumn, but I've been sneezing all day. I resolve to buy honey from a local farmer (I know of one) and eat it every morning in the hope that that will build immunity.

Sis was having a yard sale at her house; nearby, my habit of walking around streets reading bumper stickers uncovered a Stalin quote on a parked car, which is certainly a first. At the yard sale, I found a community singing songbook from the thirties-- Wikipedia doesn't seem to have an entry on community singing, but it was a fashion back then to get your whole town together in a big hall, and then sing "D'ye ken John Peel" or something. The war pretty much killed it off. Rio sold some of her old things and made $11, so we went to the shops and she spent it on badges and bracelets and so on. She also found herself a backpack with some skulls on it and some purple hairdye, again. Purple really suits her.

Links: I really and truly want to live in a world where all resumes look like this and all workplaces are worthy of them.

I think this is rather wonderful-- Penguin (the publisher) has started a dating website, but they tell you about it in an advertisement printed at the end of the book, so you can go to their site and find soulmates who want to stay up late at night in a coffee shop staring into your eyes and slowly stirring their coffee while they discuss characterisation in Doctor Zhivago or foreshadowing in Ivan Denisovich.

A poster of (pencil-drawn) cats who look like all the regenerations of the Doctor.

Hearing about this WiTricity malarkey is rather annoying me, and do you know why? I wanted to investigate the idea for my A-level Physics coursework back in '92, and was told I couldn't because it was "just science fiction". Okay, I was an A-level student and they are postdocs at MIT and fifteen years forward in time, but I wanted to write a report on whether it was possible, and if it wasn't, why not. You know Tesla himself said it was a possibility. I think it would have bumped me up at least a letter grade :(

Nargery: I have been writing a program in Python, and today I learned that "for" loops do not introduce a new scope, so if you make a closure inside a for loop, you can't bind to the control variable. But if your lambda function has a formal parameter which is initialised to the value of the control variable, that works just fine. Thanks to the #python folks for helping me there. Did you know that?

I need to talk to some of the GTK people about whether they think GTK taking over theming/frame drawing from Metacity is a good plan for 2.28. Is gtk-list the place to do that?

Lifehackery: As part of the latest push to organise myself, I decided to try this idea about getting your inbox down to zero. While I wasn't looking after it, it had grown to about 5,700 messages. After half an hour's labour this morning, it's down to 27, and I hope to bring that to zero by the end of the day. (I haven't read or used any of the Inbox Zero ideas, although I'm sure I ought to, and probably will soon.) If I didn't answer a message from you, I may have missed it in the noise. Either I will answer it soon, or I accidentally deleted it with my tag-delete command of doom. You are invited, as a general rule, to pester me again if it's been more than a week.

AWN has a useful to-do list display which shows me the number of things left to do today in a severe number in the dock, and glares at me trying to make me feel bad about it getting larger than five.

Slight nargery: I suppose famous bloggers must get this all the time, but it's always interesting when someone posts about something you post and you get to read their opinions at length; someone I don't know posted his opinion about the themes post I made the other night on the Metacity blog, which meant I got an insight into what theme authors think about how things are-- a particularly interesting insight, since, for reasons I haven't ever discovered, theme authors and window manager maintainers don't generally have much contact. I wonder what solutions there are to that problem.

Photo credit: Christopher Peplin, cc-by-nc-nd.