Cowbell blog

Any of you who are interested in CSS themes will be interested, and any of you who are not will be relieved, to hear that I've moved discussion of them off this journal onto a new Cowbell blog.  See you there, perhaps.

What I write about

I haven't been getting many comments recently.  At least in public posts and posts on ordinarily friensdlock, I've been writing mostly about what I've been thinking, which has been about work or about Metacity or about Shavian transliteration.  Maybe I should post more of my poetry?  Or I should post more introspective stuff?  I miss your comments.

Anyway:

• If you want poetry, I have nothing recent and new to show you.  But you may like the Valentine's poem I gave Fin, four years ago tomorrow.
• If you are interested in Shavian Firefox, I'm wondering whether it would be best to release it with only Shavian and Tengwar (Tengwar will apparently bring far more people in) or whether I should add Deseret and Unifon as I'd originally been planning.  That would be maybe another night's work.  I will work on this after the current chapter is written.  I am currently waiting on the LiveJournal Tengwar community to tell me whether my transliteration is correct.  If they don't get back to me soon, I may just go ahead with what I have.
• If you're interested in CSS themes, I need to do a couple more experiments to find to what extent I can use existing code in libcroco without unduly cramping what's available to us.  I would also really like your input on a syntax issue.
• If you're interested in the general-purpose Shavian transliterator, my new .po library needs releasing first.  There's also an unreleased version of L:E:A:S which needs sending out.  Both of those need to move to public repositories.
• There's a number of things I've written here over the years, like the basic introduction to heraldry, which need turning into proper websites.

Things I could perhaps give talks on at GUADEC

"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.