Tuesday, February 24, 2009

Color talk at linux.conf.au

I just got word today that the videos from linux.conf.au 2009 started showing up online, and mine was among the first set. The video is up in ogg, and should be nice and open, so grab it and check it out if you might have an interest. There's no interpretive dance, but there is juggling. The target for the talk was fairly broad, so as to be helpful to as large a group as possible.

Unfortunately, the other Inkscape presentations have not gone up yet, so we have to wait a little longer for the complete experience. Andy did a nice LPE talk, and Donna had a good intro class. I think the main problem with the latter was that there were more interested people than space for hands-on in the talk. Then again, that's usually a good problem to have, since it shows good interest.

You can download the video for "Why Color Management matters to Open Source and to You". I did get them a copy of the slides (which include full notes), but those don't seem to be online quite yet and are now up. The abstract for the talk has been online, so that's a handy summary to check and see if the video might be of interest.

Once more finish getting posted, I'll try to get a summary of some of the more interesting and/or useful up. Then again, they are good resource and are worth checking out overall.

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Monday, February 23, 2009

SCALE and GNOME and Tux and cakes

Just got back from a busy weekend at SCALE 7X. There was quite a lot to take in, and despite the downturn in the economy (or perhaps because of it) there seemed to be even more going on this year. With all the changes in situations, I was the only person representing Inkscape this year, so camped out with the GNOME guys. Ted was there, but literally next door manning the Canonical booth. He came in last-minute to give an Ubuntu talk, and was very busy. I'll do some follow-ups with details, but had to at least get a quick note up, along with some info on that visitor to our booth there...

We whipped up this little cupcake guy to hang out in the booth and perhaps get a little more interest from people walking by. Unfortunately the table was so full of good monitors that he kinda had to hang out back a bit. He did garner a bit of interest, then and the end of day one he met his fate :-) . There was some good GNOME traffic and interest, but Inkscape managed to get quite a bit going on there too. It also probably helped that right next to our setup was the other booth running World of Goo.

OpenSUSE was just behind and around the corner from us. Aside from other things, they were notable for two main points of interest to Inkscapers. The first item was Joe Brockmeier's keynote on Sunday. I think the main takeaway there is that the main problems for FOSS projects are no longer technical (our stuff is solid and works well enough), but rather is in getting the word out about the project. The second reason of note is the openSUSE Build Service. It's part of the infrastructure they are building out, but all are welcome to use it, and it builds for all "major" distros. Additionally the architect who talked with me said that it could build Win32 targets (though no Mac as of yet). That struck me as potentially helpful to take the load off of our current overloaded guy.

Well... that's probably all I can pull together without a bit more rest and tought. So in the meantime I can say.... om nom nom nom!

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