instead of a meme by a marn too busy to write one

I've got a giant cardboard box, what could we make out of it?
One of my siblings, when they were a toddler, had a giant cardboard box and called it "Harold the Fishing Boat".  When it was taken away, they complained that it had been their favourite friend.

Do you hang your clothes in your closet, all facing in the same direction?
No.  I keep them in drawers.

Why would the F.B.I. be after you?
I hope they're not: it would be very inconvenient for everyday life.

Apart from a car license, do you have a license for anything else?
I don't have a "car licence".  I don't actually have a licence for anything.

The new law is: Everyone must have a word tattooed on their forehead, what's yours going to be?
"Civil disobedience".

Are you any different than you were a year ago?
I hope so.

Everybody has a little "what" in them?
...one million Hows, two million Wheres, and seven million Whys.

Are you a talker or are you a listener?
I am a talker.  Telnet to me!

What do you shake?
Milk.

What is the one thing you know is true?
λxy.x

What do you do when you sit out on your deck or porch alone?
Walk around twiddling pipecleaners and designing systems.

What would make it a better day where you are right now?
Nothing, it's night.

Okay, bored of this, and I have other things to do.  May do some more later.  (Fin's answers are here.)

Syndicated 2009-07-03 03:48:04 (Updated 2009-07-03 03:58:02) from Monument

More Joule: UI changes

Briefly, since I'm busy:

Since it was a fairly trivial fix, I implemented a two-stage system in Joule last night, as suggested here: there's just a username box on the front page, and it takes you to an intermediate page where you pick the service.  Most people bookmark their chart page and don't use the controls, and I was aiming to make the controls simpler even at the possible cost of a few extra seconds for a first-time user.  I'm asking for feedback for or against this idea.  I've only heard one reply so far and they didn't like it.  What do you think?

Syndicated 2009-07-02 14:36:41 from Monument

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.

Syndicated 2009-07-02 02:31:28 from Monument

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.

Syndicated 2009-07-01 23:50:05 (Updated 2009-07-02 14:44:49) from Monument

Questions from Misty

Are there any words you can't stand the sound of?
No, not really.  I think each word has its own special beauty and is useful in its own place.  I don't have the revulsion to words like moist that some people claim to have.  Even a word like phthisis (presumably the source of "phtheezles" in Christopher Robin), though a name for a horrible thing, has its own strange beauty as a word.

If you are a colour, which colour are you?
Orange on some days, black on others.

What is your comfort food?
Hm.  In this country, gummy bears and milk chocolate.  In England, probably jelly babies, pickled onions, licorice allsorts, softgrain bread, and milk chocolate.
                                                                                                                              
Do you consider yourself comfortable in your own skin?
Not really.  I tend to think it's rather ugly skin, covered with plaque as it is.  But a friend of mine took some pictures of it to show me it could be beautiful, and sometimes I look at them in order to remember.
                                                                                                                              
Tell me something true.
The Scottish parliament has the legal ability under the Scotland Act to raise or lower income tax by 3%.  This is theoretically called the Tartan Tax, but the power has never been used.  (I'm not sure whether this is the sort of thing you were looking for.)

Syndicated 2009-06-30 03:47:13 from Monument