Andy Fitzsimon

Straight from the inkscape website:

The Inkscape team has posted a list of ideas for the Google Summer of Code project. If you’re a student and would like to have a summer job working on Inkscape for pay, this is a great opportunity! You can sign up send in your proposal through the Summer of Code site.

I added the idea for implementing external linking and external styles support. This is a wall-breaker for geeks like me and should be a top priority for everyone looking to make me dance on my desk.

Actually this gives me an idea. Recently I bountied up Dom Lachowicz for implementing external styles in RSVG, more people should do this, its not payment .. its like giving a case of nice beer to the mate who helped you move house. Thanks so much Do rsvg 4lyf~!!

So my deal is this: I’ll email a photo of myself dancing on my desk, signed with the inkscape calligraphy pen saying thankyou for implementing xlinking and external CSS maniulation. On top of that, you get the summer of code cash-money and the love and respect of countless SVG lemmings like myself. Pretty sweet yeah ?

just do it !

inkscape gimp and scribus

3 apps, one hell of a toolchain.

Arron is bloody hilarious.

I think he’ll end up making a whole album of songs about vectors. The vector is mightier is a great song.

Something new that he’s working on is a call to arms, about the need for vector desktops and all the real world problems they’ll solve.
I’ve tried to contribute a verse about battlers working out in the sun needing to see important machinery icons on their consoles but not reading them because the stylesheet is fixed to look like OSX. a quick edit of his CSS and the high contrast vector desktop saves the day. and his eyes from accidentally pushing that self destruct button or something . hehe we’ll see.
grab the latest cut of this evolving musical marvel.

And to think 3 years from now people will be laughing. I cant believe they didnt have mainstream vector desktops back then….

We’ve just had the Libre Graphics Meeting in Lyon, France. It was awesome.

Lots got achieved , people got pumped up, pixels were pushed, beziers were bent and meshes got made.
I’m very stoaked that a conference containing this much synergy between groups I love to participate was made possible.
Dave and the sponsors have earned some serious street cred with me that I wont soon forget. Thanks guys!

Bdale, Carl, Bryce & JonCruz.  In the background there you can see dave hustling it.

Xara LX is going to change the landscape for open source vector compositing and possibly the entire open source desktop if they’re willing *nudge nudge.
Cedric  Gemy is such a rad dude in person.

Meeting JonCruz, ReJon and Bryce makes me wish we did keysigning. So many of us have now met in person that being obsessive compulsive about security almost seems feasable.
Look at JonCruz as he watches Marti’s LCMS talk. Thats inspiration to implement colourmanagement in inkscape brewing.
And we’re well on the way now.

I went out to dinner with the GIMP gang on my last night in Lyon and we tore up the town. Libre style.

Obligatory Koala shot.  Lyon is a beautiful city. The architecture is completely different to anything i’ve grown up with.  Oh, if you want the authentic Lyon experience book to stay at the Hotel Iris, its near the Hotel De Ville subway stop and only $50 euros per night built in an old convent.
Oh yeah,  and the following week I got to do some important ‘research’ in paris visiting galleries that I’d only read about.  Aren’t open source conferences awesome?!!

As mentioned to a few people at linux.conf.au. This is what id like to  some day spend 100% of my time on.

For a few projects i’ve been lucky enough to dip into the wonderful repositories at openclipart.org and style assets to suit my clients brand. The time / cost savings keep them interested and the fact that I slightly modify non-specic illustrations to outside of their brand keep them happy too.

So before doing a massive amount of corporate stock artwork for a client , try convincing them to let you release their assets under another style and a free license to boot. As a reward you say you’ll reduce redundant production time signifigantly by pulling stock from openclipart or your own personal assets.

Check out that diagram. (pictures dont lie) Their rightful property is their identity. There is no shame in helping someone strengthen and protect that identity.
Other people’s logos and trademarks are of no use to the community. Multi-purpose templates, illustrations and other assets are what we should be looking to keep. Wouldn’t it suck if you had to draw a briefcase and do a 3 column layout template for every client you worked for before doing anything new?  Abstract the brand from the design enough and fight for your templates back on the grounds that your clients have already leveraged benefits from public assets. You’d be suprised how much ground a little rational argument like this can give, I havent been turned down once.
So long as you can reasonably separate their brand from your assets its worth fighting to have them opened up!

I mean, for me, doing things like SVG clipart and Iconsets driven by universal stylesheets would be fantastic because they make this separation even easier when you consolidate it down to a set of palette, stoke, specularity and shading manipulators. RSVG and Inkscape have yet to support external stylesheets but the day they do: i’ll dance on the nearest desk waving a bezier pen like it was a victory sword.
I hope that rant made sense but i thought id blog it anyway

So they say “a painters house is never finished”. I guess brisgeek is violently validating this statement.

Over the next week, i’ll be stepping up the pace of my virtual presence by revamping brisgeek, lugvegas and this weblog. Like all devs I’m using this blog as a vessel for all my tinkering, sporadic ideas and thoughts.

Hey I cant promise value for your time but there will be content.
And thats a nice change

Just a few notes for those who’d like to contact me, my address has changed and I now live in Toowong (Brisbane, QLD, AU).

• Mobile: +61 403 686 629
• Email: is my firstname at my lastname .com.au
• Jabber: is brisgeek@jabber.org
• IRC Nick: is AndyFitz on irc.freenode.net