Andy Fitzsimon

It looks like HK will be my home for the next 1-2 years. Drop me a line if you live in the area!

a few people have asked me why I’ve left Singapore. To be honest, I had no reason.
Singapore is a beautiful city. In business it punches higher than its weight and for my lifestyle, I loved everything about it; The climate, my friend and the region.

My girlfriend Brenda has followed her career to HK and I’m here to support that. We both tried to make it work in Singers and after 6 months we’ve realised the best opportunities were further north. A hard pill to swallow when you’re so comfortable with such a lovely area.

But living in Hong Kong changes the perspective a little. The proximity to mainland china presents insight into what i saw growing 2 years ago, a furiously scalable resource pool, something I should be paying attention to. Plus, the tech and design communities here seem more grass-roots and enterprising (most design magazines I read growing up featured HK artists) it’ll be exiting to be a part of that culture.

This is an exciting move, thanks for letting me share the news. I’ll keep you posted.

for this tutorial you need a recent build of inkscape
here is the final svg file : http://pastebin.com/f1ff1cae6

open up inkscape and click on the pencil or pen tools. Select the new spiro mode

notice the shape setting? this applies a pattern along path to match a brush like effect rather than just a solid width path.

have a scribble with the rough shape you want to accomplish

let go and checkout your awesomely smooth shape .. its probably not exactly what you want yet.. but we’ll fix that later.

to see what inkscape has done for you, checkout the path effects dialog fond in the path > path effects menu.

if you have your path selected with the node tool, you can edit your pattern along path on-canvas. just click the show “next path effect parameter for editing” (we should rename that button). Anyway, have a play with the default.

If you want to try a brush like effect, just create a star with the star tool, convert to shape (ctrl+shift+c) and delete a few middle nodes (ctrl+delete) to get a similar shape to what you see here.

All done!
now you can fill and stoke your new path effect like it was a normal shape. have fun!

someday .. i dont know when. 2geom will probably support spiro splines. and someday (hopefully soon) this means native spiro drawing with a spiro tool rather than this path effect hack we’ve got going (notice the red original path ?) eww .

I’ve finished the preparation for my GUADEC talk. Thanks to everybody who contributed their Desktop screenshots.

We’ll be submitting our proposal soon

Check out my favourite open source desktop environment:

Its been a pleasure using Rawhide this time around.. still glad to be back and stable

Over the past weeks I’ve been using rawhide (or fedora 9) on a eeepc, macbook air and inspiron 9300.. I’m certainly impressed with the setup this release has given me.

My personal highlights are: inkscape .46, firefox3, openjdk & the encrypted filesystem awesomeness ( which i dont use on the MBA or EEE for flash reasons.. actually i upgraded to rawhide from eeedora so they would use ext2 but thats another story )

Fedora 9 here we come!

From rejon’s post:

We are trying to raise USD$ 20,000 in the next 16 days before Friday, April 18th in order to support the conference and travel from so many Free and Open Source software developers to attend the 3rd Annual Libre Graphics Meeting (LGM) conference in Wroc?aw, Poland May 8 - 11 - the premiere event bringing together free and open source creative software application developers for a productive international conference (emphasis on productivity!).

This is really a big community drive for all you users, supporters, and companies to donate money so that all us free and open source developers may get together to have a productive face to face meeting. The last two LGM’s have been invaluable to coordinate, consolidate and create the future in a free and open source way.

For the next 16 days, we want all the supporting projects to put a note about this pledge drive right on their front page of their website! You can use the badge below as well to help us raise money!

You can also help by spreading the url to our pledgie campaign: http://pledgie.com/campaigns/613

And, don’t forget to digg this story: http://digg.com/linux_unix/Support_the_Libre_Graphics_Meeting_2008

More from the Pledgie.com page:

What is the Libre Graphics Meeting?

The Libre Graphics Meeting brings together developers and users of free software graphics applications, such as the GIMP, Inkscape, Scribus, Blender, Krita, the Open Clipart Library and more.

In its third edition, the organization needs your help! You can support your favorite graphics application, and ensure that the travel costs of as many volunteer developers as possible are paid to ensure that this edition of the conference is more successful that its predecessors.

Where will the money go?

We have kept costs associated with infrastructure to a minimum. Over 80% of the conference budget will be spent on subsidizing travel and accommodation costs for developers.

A non-profit organization

All donations will be made to the conference organizers via the GNOME Foundation, a 501(c)3 tax exempt US-based non-profit, so donations will be tax deductible for US taxpayers. We would like to thank the GNOME Foundation for their support.

take a peek at something new:

svn co http://svn.fedorahosted.org/svn/documentation-devel/

.. more later

source update later

Let the flood of remixing begin!