Stations

(with apologies to A. A. Milne)

I'm often lost in ruminations
On what I'd do if stuck at stations.

If I were stuck at HARINGEY,
I'd pitch a tent and ask to stay.

If I were stuck at STEVENAGE,
I'd build a campfire, on the bridge.

If I were stuck at FINSBURY PARK,
I'd dance around it, in the dark.

If I were stuck at MORROWGATE, (*)
I'd phone and tell you I'd be late.

If I were stuck at HATFIELD HERTS,
I'd win my fare by playing darts.

If I were stuck at POTTERS BAR,
I'd wish upon the northern star.

If I were stuck at... anywhere,
I'd really rather you were there.

(*) The original has "Norroway", so I feel this sort of thing is quite justified.

One of the fun things about coming home from Europe is identifying your pocket change

Fin: you were right, that ten-cent piece was Italian.

Walking home with takeaway food

Marn: "You know how in English the spelling system is very conservative, so we spell knight K N I G H T because it was pronounced that way once, even though we don't pronounce it that way any more."
Rio: "That makes sense."
Marn: "Well, in the Chinese writing system they have that problem too, only more so."
Rio: "A more radical problem?"
Marn: "... Ha ha."
Rio: "I did that without even trying."

Based on something Alex said

I know a young fellow who's dating a bloke.
It's no joke:
he's dating a bloke.

He's dating the bloke as well as a girl,
He's dating the girl as well as a guy,

But I don't know why
he's dating the guy.

Perhaps he's bi.

14 by 14

I have a poem in this month's 14 by 14.  I think it's among my top five favourite pieces I've ever written.

gjm11: I'm sorry I never responded to your critique; it was incisive and helpful.  Thank you!

Two things still trouble me about the poem (but read it before you read these):

• There are two conscious references to the Book of Revelation in the sestet, but I cannot remember having consciously thought about the "river of the water of life, bright as crystal" when I wrote "a spring to clean away the winter's dust"; yet it's in the next verse to one of the conscious references and I must surely have done it on purpose.  It's far too neat for an accident.
• The entire sonnet came out as a StealthPun; I thought of making it explicit and decided against it.  I would love to know whether anyone noticed.

Weekly report on xzibit

Surprisingly much work got done on xzibit this week, despite my being at Guadec.

Week 30 (of the year, not the project):

• Metadata can be sent about windows. This is trickier than it sounds, because the window might not yet be mapped on the receiving side.
• Demonstrated the system in a talk at Guadec on Friday.
• This got Xzibit mentioned in a German magazine (seventh paragraph).
• Discovered why menus don't get drawn: GDK doesn't receive expose events on override-redirect windows (at least in some circumstances).
• Made a start on multiplexing the various streams so it will be easier to send them over Tubes, and wrote tests for the marshalling.

Plans for week 31:

• Discover why expose events don't get received on override-redirect windows, and either fix it or use something else.
• Finish multiplexer.
• Make gtk-vnc be able to read from fifos (if it can't already) so that we can easily hook up the windows on the receiving end and still run them in separate processes, without having to mess around with TCP. May need to send a patch upstream for this.
• Consider the ramifications of using a single gtk-vnc process for all received windows; maybe it could just eavesdrop on the received multiplex stream without any other interpretation.
• Switch to sid so I can run Daniel's spiffy build of Xephyr, and use it to test the MPX work.
• Send window icons in the metadata.
• Send transiency information in the metadata (including Cartesian offset from the parent window, something I realised we need in this place last week).
• Start thinking about how to implement the doppelganger cursor. Someone in the audience suggested decorating it with a hackergotchi, which I think is a wonderful idea.