Andy Fitzsimon

One of the purest forms of leadership I can think of is when something both inconvenient & innovative happens and the people capable of stunting its growth refuse to stand in the way.

One day I hope to witness a decision like that being taken place. It would truly be a privilege to surrender profit & power for a universally beneficial change.
In the meantime we have Vista. Congratulations to the Microsoft team

No hang on,
This post was meant to be about mentorship. Something I would really benefit from.

I am currently seeking a design mentor who has the time and motivation to take me on as a mentee:

• Somebody who can understand motivations for free software & free culture.
• Relate to durkheim’s theorys of a collective conciousness & Understand design theory as it applies to communities, brands & cultures.
• Freedom of communication design, typography, design across cultures and countries (especually the ones i dont yet understand).

If pretty much anything there rings a passionate tune and you are willing to share your experience, please drop me a line here.

Okay so Sydney has been awesome so far. Karla has had the chance to catch up with her brother, participate in the wonderful partners program and also score a ‘linus sighting’ at the Google party.

LCA is a great chance to meet up with those mates who you only get to see once a year (but talk to every day ). Morgan Tocker from MySQL spent last year living down the road from us but now he’s off to montreal where we will only see him at LCA (and the next libre graphics meeting ) plug plug

For those who weren’t able to make it… the conference looks a little like this.

Okay thats a photo Karla took when her group visited the Zoo yesterday.

My talk starts at 11 in matthews C. Rock on by if you are even vaguely interested in web technologies, publishing, artwork or just wasting time by watching bling bling. If else please visit Chris’s Sugar talk and report back to me for theft of your brainy cached data stuffs

Well, its only hours to go and soon all Aussies will be saying G’day to 2007.

I thought id quickly blog post and summarize how 2006 has been for me and what I expect for 2007.

Travel:

This year was the most I have traveled within a 12 month period. 5 countries in 10 months :America, China(&Tibet), France, Singapore, & NewZealand.

It started with Linux.conf.au in Dunedin NZ (the best one yet) I was honoured to speak there and score a best of talk followed by a helicopter ride over the city.

France for the Libre Graphics Meeting where cross project developers and artists got to meet for the first time and discuss our future. That gave me the chance to visit Paris and finally see some galleries I had studied as a child.

Singapore for Red Hat related things. An awesome time chilling with colleagues and drinking sugar cane juice in the humidity.

Then the 4 personal weeks in China and Tibet that let me witness things larger than life and really get to know some of the nicest locals in both the smallest towns and even the biggest cities. You know who you are. Thankyou for the brilliant time and perspective. China and Tibet both gave me a lot to think about.

Coming back from china I flew into Brisbane with only a few hours to shower in the airport and switch suitcases with Karla so that I had warm clothes for the Boston Summit. Great to see the familiar faces and meet the people I hadn’t previously had the fortune to meet.

Work:

At some point this year I was asked to leave my graphical services business and help Shadowman on his quest for sexy i18n and content engineering over at Red Hat.

I was actually very happy with my career at FITC but this was really one offer I couldn’t turn down.
I went to Red Hat for these reasons and more:

• Working intimately with free graphics software is mandatory and not “nice to do if you can convince your client for this project (which is pretty easy..but)”
• Red Hat APAC is located in my home city, which I love for its population, geographical location, friends and family.
• Red Hat Linux 8 was my first serious use of a distro and the first thing that made me realise that there are seriously sane professionals working on this stuff (mostly it was the fact that it was the first really branded representation of free software). It convinced me to trail exclusive use of free graphics software for my occupation and sparked my interest in free software.
• I’m passionate about internationalization in design even though I only translate between english and bad english myself.
• I love an uphill fight and the Oracle attention was christmas come early.

Projects:

I’ve been kept pretty busy with work related projects in 2006 but here’s some amazing things that we’ve witnessed in projects I love in 06:

Inkscape - Blur filter!!!, speed optimisations, node tool enhancements, hundreds of extensions.

open clipart - Sadly, we saw not enough. and I’d say that I’m also at fault for a lack of recent contributions and design work for the website. However one important change was made . The move to ccHost. that introduces the concept of remixing other peoples work Its inspired me to do some mockups for new look. should be easy enough to get this design into css and xhtml (before LCA i hope)

Gnome - the year we saw Compiz/Beryl make gnome look so much more sexy (I’m a huge fan of the aggressively forked projects ) the beryl guys seriously rock for their efforts in taking something great and making it even better for their users.

Blender: I actually have a disstaste for the animation games industries especially when it comes to working status of the actual developers(in the real world). So blender gets neglected by me because I haven’t picked up a mesh, spline or nurb since my adventures using 3dsmax3 in 2001. But! the open movie Elephants dream was released this year and it marks a major high for the quality that can be created from exclusively free software. so now I’m proud to own at least one of the too few DVD’s you can buy and actually own the rights to screen publicly. Watching it at 1920×1200 on a 24″ monitor blows peoples minds and keeps the kids inspired

Relationship:

Karla and I are still living in Toowong (Brisbane) and 2006 presented to us the greatest challenges and rewards in a relationship that I have ever known. It’s brilliant to feel alive and to have a loving and beautiful person like her by my side.
Subtitle: even if we fight, it’s like Italian opera but with an enormous sense of humor.

2007 looks like the same crazy show for us this time I get the chance to take Karla to both Linux.conf.au and then we holiday to NewYork and Canada in April.

Personal tech Goals - 2007 is:

the year I start publicly video blogging some Inkscape tutorials (promise )
the year openclipart gets sexy and feature full ( consider this a high goal ).
the year of our second Libre Graphics Meeting held on Montreal.
the year fedora gets all my Desktop design attention.

See you next year

I can say without any doubt 2006 has been the best one in my life. 2005 was pretty decent effort also so here’s hoping the trend continues.

Wishing everyone all the best for the new year and all the excitement it brings.

G’day, looks like i can’t get to a spot where i can upload photos so i’ll update this post with a flickr link or something later… The greatwall and other places just have to be seen.

I didn’t take my laptop because with 28days travelling china anything can happen. And it actually has.

The last 3 days were in beijing so I finally got a chance to meet the awesome group of people at Beijing LUG we spoke for a while about free graphics software, openclipart and grabbed some very valuable desktop feedback because believe it or not I’m heading to the gnome summit just two hours after my flight from china lands back in brisbane.

Last minute purchasing of tickets means that i head from kreming to singapore to brisbane.. do a quick switch of trinkets for laptop and new clothes in the international terminal then head off to boston via LA 42 odd hours spent between china and boston.. my DS lite is going to see some serious play time ;-).

Anyway off again. im in xiang right now and its my only chance to score more compact flash memory for this boat trip thing..

love ya stacks karla !! see you mid october baby

Did a few mockups today for inkscape .

Just wanted to show my favorite mothod for using the filters once they have finished being implemented.
Below is a mockup.

Also I created a styles editor mockup. This is my dream interface ( oh the filters of love svg is really being rendered by inkscape’s current implementation of the blur filter but most of the other new stuff is just mocked up )

Just incase you didnt notice it , the link icon on the tab means inkscape loaded an externally referenced stylesheet for editing.
I guess I’ll have to show a tab highlighted to illustrate it contains styles relevant to the selected object , then highlight the lines in the editor for the rules that apply to the selected object.

Really, a visual css editor within inkscape is nessecary ( as well as editing of objects that exist in document defs and not on the canvas. For that id have to mockup some kind of object library dialog where users can drag / drop element references to it.

Just a thought.

Last night Karla and I flicked on the TV ( that’s a television for you internet kids) and witnessed personal open-content history in the making…

It seem F-grade comedy show The Wedge has a segment where a schoolgirl named Lucy records messages of comical obsession through her computers webcam. ( to some guy named dylan )

Anyway, this skits always start with a computer desktop environment featuring icons that I contributed to the public domain!!!!

Most prominently is an Inkscape icon, gnome-terminal illustration and various others.  Im sure they  got to these via openclipart where all my contributions are pledged to the public domain and free to use anywhere.
The icons are very old works of mine so im guessing they look the part for a crazy stalker chicks desktop.

This is almost as cool as the mention of ubuntu on teen-drama veronica mars by a character who later is revealed as a terrorist. Hah!  isnt TV great..  stay tuned kids !
Pledging content to PD is great because you dont have to be 70 years dead to appreciate someone else using it.

peace

Unless Aaron releases one after this: Stremenstance

You’ll laugh, you’ll cry. You’ll even look towards the future and wonder why you’ve lost the taste for seafood.
Congratulations ACSpike on this masterful releasing of songs.

Made for NARMo , Stremenstance is a journey through awesomeness!!!!

enough said.

Nowadays the inkscape logo gets alot of exposure around the world and our beloved app has also greatly matured since the logo was first illustrated.

It’s high-time the logo-design matured to suit the quality of the app itself. So I’ve re-aligned the inkscape logo . Changes are now in svn trunk.
Hopefully without close comparison there is little difference to the casual observer.
So here is the 2-up just incase you don’t notice the change.

You can click the image to download the 2KB SVG file of the new logo.