The books on the shelf closest to me

• Androcles and the Lion, Shaw Alphabet Edition (the hardback, not the paperback as in that video)
• Knuth's Art of Computer Programming
• Advanced CORBA programming with C++ (not sure what that's doing there)
• The X Window System, Scheifler & Gettys
• Elements of New Testament Greek
• The Sidney Sussex College Annual
• Thoughtcrime Experiments
• The Scheme Programming Language
• Ender's Game

I think I should sort them better.

Four ways of doing a web interface for the Shavian transliterator

(written while waiting for a compile; this is me thinking aloud...)

Earlier, I mentioned my existing tool to transliterate into the Shavian alphabet, and my thoughts of doing it as a web tool rather than tidying up and releasing the existing command-line stuff.  There are four ways I can see of doing this:

1. Make it almost entirely separate from the wiki.  You would upload your translation catalogue, and the page would let you specify how you wanted it transliterated, and then download the result.  The only connection with the wiki would be the ability to specify transliterations of each word which would then be rolled back into the wiki.
2. Allow people to upload catalogues to the wiki, but then convert it to wiki markup.  In this case, we would have a system which could turn various formats of translation catalogue into standard MediaWiki markup, and another system which would turn them back; then there could be a bot which updated the MediaWiki text.  This would mean that hand-editing would be fairly easy, but brings in the great nuisance of writing the conversion systems.
3. Allow people to upload catalogues to the wiki, and treat them as files.  MediaWiki allows file storage, which is usually used for images.  It's turned off on the Shavian wiki, but it could be turned on for translation catalogues.  Then all the faff of making the system upload and download things would be done for us.
4. Allow people to upload catalogues to the wiki, and treat them as text.  After all, they are text.  This idea means that there would be a separate namespace for translation catalogues within wiki pages, such as Translation:Metacity.po.  The system would probably render all these as a message saying "Please view source", at least until I got around to a system to render the various catalogue formats to HTML.  Then a bot controlled from a separate page could easily update them to change the Shavian transliteration, and the files could be hand-edited without too much difficulty.

I think I like the fourth option best.

In other news, part of this journal (the part tagged "nimyad") is now on the conlang aggregator; I am pondering the idea of a "Planet Shavian".