Monument

"From English to English: an introduction to dialectal translation"

• overview of non-US English dialects: en-GB (and why it's not en-UK), en-CA, en-AU, others
• is this necessary or important?  (Yes.)
• How it's done (at an automated level); Abigail's script
• How it's done (at a human level) and why we need to hand-check ("Colourado"; sometimes a check is not a cheque)
• Common dialectal substitutions in software (we can find these out programmatically)
• Controversies about translations: how on earth do we translate trash?  Dialogue box or dialog box?  If we call the eraser a rubber, will people laugh?
• Punctuation differences
• Actual phrasing differences rather than spelling and word substitution
• Dialect versus language (e.g. Scots)
• How many teams in various free software projects are working on each dialect?  GNOME, KDE, Launchpad, Firefox... coordination
• Automated transliteration into non-Latin alphabets for English (you knew I had to get this in somewhere), and why
• How you can help with all this

"The history of window border decorations"

• the concept of reparenting and frame windows
• different ways to express decorations: preset, code, pixmap, vector...
• reasons generalising theming is difficult
• reasons theming buttons is particularly difficult
• timeline of various WMs' ability to do this
• particular cases of how various WMs deal with this, with examples
• how it's played out over the history of Metacity
• which theme formats are most widely used?
• how window border themes relate to other kinds of theme
• the theme artist community as opposed to the WM developer community
• theme formats used across multiple WMs
• CSS themes

I wonder whether anyone would be interested in either of these.  Would you come to hear them if you saw them on the programme?  Would they be of any use?  Perhaps I'll submit both of them and see whether either of them are approved.

Edit: Of course I could also do a talk on writing N900 apps.

There is a standard set of buttons you can use in Metacity.  Here is a rather nice diagram I drew a few months ago which tells you what they are and what they do.

The question I am pondering is whether we should allow window managers which use Cowbell CSS themes to specify new buttons outside the standard set of menu, close, minimize, maximize, shade, stick, above.

Why we should:

• I want to make Cowbell as usable as possible by other window managers.  If a window manager has a button that can't be represented in that set, they can't use the theme format.
• I would like to add new buttons to Metacity anyway, like screenshot and share.

Why we shouldn't:

• Most importantly, themes need to declare how to draw buttons.  If we're going to allow people to come up with arbitrary buttons, how is the theme going to know how to draw them?  People can't write themes which know how to draw every button type anyone could ever dream up in the future.  I discussed this in more depth here.

This week: Collabora have been supporting me in working on Metacity over the last week or so. I began by trying to get the CSS themes branch merged, but then decided that a better use of my time would be patch review, especially given the impending feature freeze. Here's a partial list of some of the things I've touched; I'll update it for this week when this week's over.

ProjectJournal: Producing the Metacity Journal and other Metacity blog posts has been a helpful record of people's work on the program, but blogging about the project does tend to drive out actual maintenance and development. For this reason, a while ago I wrote a program called ProjectJournal which would prepare Metacity Journal posts automatically.

ProjectJournal used to scan IMAP folders for Bugzilla notifications and svn checkins. It would then output a list of bugs that had been touched, files that had been modified, and translations that had been made, as well as any hits for the name of the project on Google Blog Search, add a photo, and then post it as a draft to blogs.gnome.org. Then a human (me) would come along and tidy it up and write the introduction, resulting in posts like this one. It was a neat hack, and saved a lot of time, but it's rotted because it was never rewritten to work with git. Also, Bugzilla should be queryable directly now, though ours isn't at a version where the API supports queries, so it would have to be done with a screen-scraper. Ugh.

What I'm wondering is whether any of you would be interested in using such a tool for your own projects, if I resurrected and modernised it. Do let me know.

(For several months there was also a daily Bug of the Day post, but although that was fun and got the community discussing the issues, it didn't help the time I had available for coding. Perhaps the project needs someone who likes writing better than coding, a sort of public recorder. Or perhaps I could carry on doing it if there were many other people writing the code.)

Posts that might interest you: In case you're not reading the Metacity blog, here are some interesting posts from the last week:

• How should we make alt-Tab decide whether to show all windows or just those on the current workspace?


• What would be needed to move tabs into the window manager?


• How can dragging to an edge cause effects (like Microsoft's Aero Snap)?


• When should a function be in the window manager, and when should it be an external tool?


• Can we set border widths independently of the theme? Lots of people are asking.

Feel free to dive in on the discussions. Feel even more free to volunteer to write patches for some of these; I'll try to give you all the help you might need.

Podcast: At one point I used to record myself reading all the Metacity blog posts (such as this one). I'm not sure whether I should bring this feature back, or what should happen to it further if I did.

I haven't posted for a while. Here are four things:

1. Collabora have been supporting the CSS-on-window-borders project recently by letting me work on it during work hours. Here is a status update.


2. Recent updates to shavian.org.uk include a gentle Shavian tutorial and translations of all the recent XKCDs into Shavian.


3. Many years ago, I wrote a sonnet for use on a server's custom 404 page:
   

   So many years have passed since first you sought
   the lands beyond the edges of the sky,
   so many moons reflected in your eye,
   (familiar newness, fear of leaving port),
   since first you sought, and failed, and learned to fall,
   (first hope, then cynicism, silent dread,
   the countless stars, still counting overhead
   the seconds to your final voyage of all…)
   and last, in glory gold and red around
   your greatest search, your final quest to know!
   yet… ashes drift, the embers cease to glow,
   and darkened life in frozen death is drowned;
   and ashes on the swell are seen no more.
   The silence surges. Error 404.

   
   It's been spreading itself around, mostly without my permission, so I'm releasing it under a Creative Commons licence. Fly free, little sonnet! Please feel free to copy it onto your own sites, and if you would, let me know you've done so.


4. I need to write more of the Maemo tutorials. They will be coming soon. Sorry; things have been busy.