Things that need doing on Joule

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.

Cascade of attention-deficit teenagers

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.