marnanel | Entries tagged with day

Rio and I went for a walk and found a lost dog without a collar. While we were walking it around, it went to a house and sat outside it, so we decided it must belong there.

We all had a good long talk with Katie on IM tonight. It was so good to see her face again.

I should make an OKCupid test called "What kind of formal verse are you?"

My referrer logs indicate that I am the fourth Google image search hit for "naked dancing", though the page was not actually about naked dancing at all (it was about psoriasis, and I was complaining that it made my skin hurt where my clothes touched it, and that I therefore envied anyone who could dance about naked).

I have decided that the Yarrow-ification of my blog has been a success. You can read individual entries, years, months, random articles, or tags and subtags. I still need to get it to syndicate stuff off my Dreamwidth journal, but that's not far away. (Do note that the skin won't be the same when it's all done: it just has the standard Yarrow skin at present.) It's been so successful for me that I wonder whether other people would be interested in using it.

I am feeling very, very tired tonight.

Rio and I spent a good while today playing with Alice. We made a table with a button which, if pressed, would cause a yellow chicken to fly over and spin around. For her bedtime story I read her the first chapter of The Phoenix and the Carpet.

I should reiterate that, as I said at the time, I myself don't think using WebKit in the window manager sounds like a good idea. Since someone had raised the idea, I thought it was worth discussing, and now it certainly has been discussed.

I was trying to typeset some of my work the other day (for some reason), and I noticed how odd it looks to set sonnets in a sans-serif font...

Remember all the old familiar faces?
Helvetica's the nicest of the lot.
Gill Sans and Johnston take the second places;
It seems as though the serif has been shot.
Verdana has its own intrinsic glories;
The fairest text that ever left my desk
Was set in these-- for essays or for stories.
But using them for sonnets? That's grotesque.
And gravestones are a special case as well:
A mortal lack of serif fonts would be
A certain kind of typographic hell
With Comic Sans for all eternity.
In death, the Roman lettering is best.
May flights of serifs sing thee to thy rest.

First off, I want to thank Google for giving out water bottles. This morning I forgot my lanyard with the name badge on it, and had to walk for forty minutes in the sun to the hotel and back. Google, you made it much less unpleasant than it could have been. Also, Nokia gave us towels and USB keys, and Intel are giving us coffee and ice-cream every day.

The flight to Las Palmas was delayed yesterday, and we missed some of the opening talks-- apparently RMS was singing. But we arrived in time for the lightning talks; I heard one on refactoring, one on KDE's triage team (which sounds like a great idea), one on improving OCR in Linux, and some others. Later I went back to the hotel and slept while other people were eating (my choice: I was quite horribly jetlagged) and then we all ended up on the roof talking about tech stuff until about midnight, when we dispersed.

There was a sign up saying "Don't try to upgrade your system: there are 700 of us here." The network has been getting a little overloaded. I'm now sitting in a talk about Bluetooth. People keep trying to pair with the speaker's devices.

I will take some pictures and post them. I haven't seen any actual canaries here, but perhaps I haven't been looking hard enough.

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.

Woke up at a good time, around seven. Promptly and stupidly decided to go back to sleep to see what the end of the dream was; it turned out to be a nightmare. Woke up again at about eleven and went to the gym. Continued the run of stupid mistakes by forgetting to get lunch for Rio. Sharon came by and brought her lunch instead. I hate getting up late. :(

Later, went to the diner for dinner. Talked to Alex about a shelving project he's working on.

Did a little tidying, but not very much. But I've got some way towards Inbox Zero: I'm now down to four emails.

Today I learned that cd - changes to the directory you were in before the current one.

Fin gave me an old notebook of zirs to use as a logbook. It's lovely.

It occurs to me that the simple system I built a while ago which mostly allows Ubuntu to come up in Shavian would also work to get Deseret, Unifon and Tengwar. I wonder whether there's much of a market for Ubuntu in Tengwar. Possibly good Slashdot fodder, anyway.

Joule-for-Dreamwidth is edging closer. I also need to implement a per-day view with a paging system to get around this problem.

Five days until GCDS starts.

On Saturday we went to help a friend of ours move house; then we went and ate at a diner called Tom Jones, which was rather good really. On Sunday we went and played D&D again at Bae's house; my elven cleric used up several saving throws against dying in battle. And today I made dinner: it was spaghetti.

The Mutter maintainers have decided that Mutter will henceforth be a proper fork of Metacity and that the projects will go their own ways. This means, of course, that Metacity will not ship as standard in GNOME 3. I am wondering what should happen to Metacity now; I have a couple of branches to merge, and then I think I would really rather work on Mutter than carry on with a project that practically nobody will use. It would be good to work with a team of others again, too: I've been mostly alone on Metacity for a while now.

I have modified the Shavian wiki so that the metadata is held on article pages instead of talk pages. It looks like this. I have been discussing some ideas about this wiki with some people, and I am wondering whether it would be generally more useful if the data was held in IPA format and the Shavian text was produced using a transformation on that data, just as Unifon and so on are now. I am also wondering whether allowing anonymous editing would increase participation enough to be worth the risk of vandalism.

It's been raining for days. Rio (whose website is now a little out of date) says we should put the rain into jars and call it "bottled annoyance".

Speaking of Rio, she's been learning the trumpet for a few months now. Tonight we went to a concert her school were putting on. There was a high school jazz band, too, and now she's decided she wants to be a jazz trumpeter. She's asking for trumpet jazz CDs, and Fin is asking whether you have any recommendations. All this makes me want to pick up the bass again. Perhaps I need to take lessons.

We had to take Rothko to the vet. He'll be fine. The other cats are missing him rather.

I didn't get much done this weekend; I've been feeling kind of out of sorts recently. I did manage to spend an hour or so on Sunday adding Digg support to Joule, and later I added support for Doug Ewell's spiky rune-like Ewellic alphabet to the Shavian wiki here. Which is your favourite of the scripts we have so far? (You'll need IE, Safari, or Firefox 3.5 to see them without downloading fonts.)

S	M	T	W	T	F	S
						1
2	3	4	5	6	7	8
9	10	11	12	13	14	15
16	17	18	19	20	21	22
23	24	25	26	27	28	29
30	31

Monument

Entries tagged with day

stuff and nonsense

Venite prandete

Aquarius

Cascade of attention-deficit teenagers

Sunday

a few days

Bottled annoyance

Profile

January 2022

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