Monument

further midday updates

Wed, 07 Oct 2009 16:24:52 GMT

IT IS RIORDON'S BIRTHDAY. Happy birthday to the kid who is officially the most awesome kid in the world.
The nicest Joule comment ever.
Two reviewers in Canada want physical copies of Borrowable: one says they will probably review it and one might review it. One other reviewer doesn't want it because it's self-published. I will therefore be ordering more author copies when my paycheque comes through.
The Launchpad people will allow Shavian translations only if we first fix the bugs in Launchpad which are holding it up. Arc does not seem to think this will be a major difficulty.
Cambridge University Library "would be delighted" to add Borrowable to their collections.
I have just received a (free) review copy of Writing Children's Books For Dummies.
I have finished A Tale of Two Guinea-Pigs and thoroughly enjoyed it. A review follows, later today.
Did I mention there was a quiz on the Borrowable site now? And the start of a recipe collection?

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stuff and nonsense

Wed, 12 Aug 2009 03:34:32 GMT

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.

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Venite prandete

Mon, 20 Jul 2009 04:05:09 GMT

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...

Remember all the old familiar faces?
Helvetica's the nicest of the lot.
Gill Sans and Johnston take the second places;
It seems as though the serif has been shot.
Verdana has its own intrinsic glories;
The fairest text that ever left my desk
Was set in these-- for essays or for stories.
But using them for sonnets? That's grotesque.
And gravestones are a special case as well:
A mortal lack of serif fonts would be
A certain kind of typographic hell
With Comic Sans for all eternity.
In death, the Roman lettering is best.
May flights of serifs sing thee to thy rest.

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Cascade of attention-deficit teenagers

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 02:31:24 GMT

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.

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Bottled annoyance

Wed, 06 May 2009 01:51:33 GMT

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.)

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