Planet Inkscape

Andy Fitzsimon: What an LGM. I mean wow!

Thu, 15 May 2008 06:56:03 +0000

It will be weeks before I can actually take in all of the developments, conversations, challenges and potential each participating project had benefited from.

I’ll have to categorize the areas of massive development:

It was like a wedding of api’s, libraries, programs and users: All parts of the open source creative chain met together and the fusion was immediate and real.

Colour: management in our files, our applications and throughout our desktop.
Typography: management, libraries, designing, accessibility and the authors.
Geometry: Rendering api, computational libraries, new methods and in our apps
Publishing: the best workflow, the toolchains, the standards and the content.
Image: composting frameworks, open formats, editing articulation ..more
Insight & Implementation: research, usability, interaction design & planning

I’ll try to pull apart these categories to cover each projects benefits of the meeting. Like I said, its a lot to take in… I couldn’t be more happy.

So, Thank you!

Thank you to everyone who made the most of their time during LGM.
You were teaching, learning, coding and planning. As a collective, our understanding grew into other new worlds and our code will benefit.

Thank you to everyone who made LGM happen. You were sponsors, helping out during the day, and making introductions between projects.

Even the people who couldn’t make it to Poland, your efforts made LGM possible and look at the benefits. So thank you, again and again.

I’ve always known open source is the best way to develop software (and ideas) and LGM is such a real demonstration of the fact.

I should probably get preachy and mention that the most expensive proprietary company SLA’s will never get you this kind of synergy between your engineers and the api’s they use. But there’s plenty of time for that later.

Stay tuned for more news soon. I’m off to have some chilli crab!

Andy Fitzsimon: Fedora 9 is out !

Thu, 15 May 2008 03:40:16 +0000

Check out my favourite open source desktop environment:

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

Gail Carmichael: My Google NYC Visit

Wed, 14 May 2008 10:58:15 +0000

It's been almost two weeks since I left for New York City to pay Google a visit, but with the hectic schedule surrounding the mini-course, I haven't been able to write about it yet. Now that things have calmed down and I have some time to tell you all about it, I hope I can remember the fun little details!

For those that don't know, the reason I went to Google was for the Anita Borg Scholars' retreat. I was a finalist for the inaugural Canadian edition of the scholarship. There were 17 amazing Canadian women in total, four of whom were winners and 13 who were finalists. Google flew us to New York City to visit the Google offices and meet each other.

I was lucky enough to actually know another finalist from Carleton, Terri, so we flew together from the Ottawa airport early (like, 5am early) Thursday morning. When we got to La Guardia in New York, our driver was nowhere to be found. It turns out that he picked up another Carmichael on our plane that happened to get to him first (since she was also waiting for a driver, she just assumed he was the one). But eventually he came back for us and brought us to our super awesome Hotel Gansevoort.

Unfortunately, there weren't any rooms available for us yet (despite the promise to the retreat organizer, Jordan, that there would be). So Terri and I decided to walk around and see if we could figure out where Google was. When I found a building I saw in the street view for the Google address, we decided to explore inside.

We didn't see any signs for Google, so we figured this probably wasn't the right building (Google is actually housed in the Port Authority building across the street). No matter -- this building was very cool architecturally!

It was the old National Biscuit Company building (keeping mind that we were in the middle of the meat packing district of Manhattan), and the designers worked very hard to make it industrial and chic. The photo above shows water falling from a large pipe and highlighted with a glowing blue. There were benches made out of stone, large chunks of metal here and there, and many cool little food related shops. That last part may have had something to do with the fact that the Food Network also lived there.

Anyway, we eventually made it back to the hotel to find Jordan waiting for us in the lobby. We finally got our rooms, just in time to throw our stuff inside before brunch. This hotel was swank. When you walked into your room, they had this cool jazzy/house CD playing and the lights set up nicely. Even better, we each got our own room!

After brunch, we finally got to check out the Google offices. The day felt like it should be over by then, having been up at 4am, yet it was only noon! Being in the Google offices was, as you can imagine, pretty special. We spent a lot of our time in the Tech Talk room, which had a nice, informal feel to it. That, and random loud clanking noises from the huge elevator on the other side of the wall. Apparently the floor used to be a bus repair center, so that elevator could carry cars and buses. But I digress.

We had several talks from some really interesting Google folks (mostly women, but some men, too). I think it would be best to save info about those for future posts, or else this one will be too long for anyone to want to read!

On Thursday night, we were treated to a dinner at the Spice Market, a cool little restaurant almost right beside our hotel. Instead of us ordering what we wanted, they just kept bringing all the food on the "menu" to the table for everyone to share. It wasn't totally my style of food, but I found enough to eat, and the atmosphere was pretty cool.

We had about four or five hours of free time on Saturday afternoon to do the tourist thing. Not much time to cram in so much sight-seeing! A few of us cabbed up to Ground Zero to see the progress there. I hadn't ever seen the area with the towers there, so technically I didn't know the difference. However, it was painfully obvious that there was something missing, based on the entire block of blankness among rows and rows of very tall buildings. Very strange.

Then, after getting lost in some train system that wasn't the subway like we thought, we eventually found the real subway and made it to Central Park. It's an odd feeling walking into such a vast area of greenery after being bombarded with concrete for a couple of days. Even more odd when you consider that, back home, a little green space is certainly not rare!

We didn't have much time to walk around, so we just took a quick look and then walked through the monstrosity that is Times Square. I wish we had more time to look into the giant Toys R Us with the ferris wheel inside, or maybe Madame Tussuad's. Alas, if we were going to make it back in time for the boat cruise, we would only be able to rush along the main drag. I guess you could say we were scouting what to see the next time we found ourselves in New York ;)

The last big event of the retreat was the boat cruise that went... well, I'm not really sure where it went exactly, but I do know we circled the Statue of Liberty! That thing is a whole lot smaller than you would expect, that's all I can say.

To conclude, I just want to reiterate how awesome this retreat was, and how amazingly amazing the group of scholars and Google organizers really were. I think that this will be just a beginning for us. If we were able to do such great things on our own, imagine what we can do now that we have each other as advisers, mentors, and friends!

(P.S. I forgot my bathing suit in my hotel room, where it was drying. So if you happen to stay in room 702....)

John Bintz: Disappearing Home Page Bug Fixed

Wed, 14 May 2008 10:45:15 +0000

Sorry if you’ve ever experienced the problem here where the contents of the Home Page would disappear. It was a weird WordPress thing that I just repaired. It should be working fine now.

John Bintz: The Prioritizer, Web 2.0-style!

Wed, 14 May 2008 02:36:28 +0000

OK, so I love CNN Money’s Prioritizer for prioritizing things (anything really, from decisions on what to save my money for, to helping a client determine what they truly find important with regards to their Website’s purpose, to finding out what makes, for me, a good book cover for a children’s graphic novel). Now, there’s a Web 2.0 Ajax Social Networky way of doing the same thing: the Idea Sandbox Prioritizer. It’s a lot quicker to run through than the CNN Money one, too! Only one downside: no numeric scoring in the Idea Sandbox version, just the straight prioritizing of items, so if you need the numbers for justification, stick with CNN Money’s version (for now).

Ryan Lerch: Fedora 9 release coverage (so far)

Wed, 14 May 2008 02:03:31 +0000

Comment me if you have more links…

Ryan Lerch: Fedora 9 Released

Tue, 13 May 2008 20:25:46 +0000

Yes, it it true… Fedora 9 has been released. I am downloading via bittorrent as we speak.

digg fedora 9 here!!!

MenTaLguY: atomic_ops

Tue, 13 May 2008 16:44:59 +0000

atomic_ops is a library of portable primitives for building lockfree multithreaded programs in C, by Hans Boehm of libgc fame. The basic atomic operations portion of the library is MIT-licensed, although it also includes a GPLed addon library which provides nearly lockfree stacks and a lockfree malloc implementation.

Gail Carmichael: Don't Underestimate the Importance of Role Models

Tue, 13 May 2008 12:02:35 +0000

I recently came across a timely article called "Young Girls Not Interested in IT Careers Due to Lack of Female Role Models, RIM Study Finds." Apparently, only 28% of girls in Britain are expressing any possible interest in technology careers, compared to 53% of the boys. But this isn't all that surprising. What I found interesting were the reasons cited for this difference.

The article's survey was conducted by Research In Motion and found that there just aren't enough smart female role models amongst the Britney Spears and Paris Hiltons of the world. From the article:

"Never underestimate the power of role models. If young women can see a career path which has been enjoyable and rewarding for another, they are more likely to follow it themselves," said Maggie Philbin, former host of popular British science and technology TV show, Tomorrow's World.

Funny. This is one of the major points brought up last week during my mini-course for girls about computer science and games. We had been discussing why girls don't get into the field, and they figured it was like a vicious circle. There aren't many girls in the field, so the younger students don't think of it as something they'd want to get into, so the numbers never grow.

But this isn't the only finding that matched up with my students' suggestions. Other reasons given for not wanting to pursue a technology career included the belief that it would not be exciting, the jobs are seen as too geeky, they don't realize the pay is good, and there isn't enough help in school for exploring opportunities. Again, all things that my class suggested.

So it's our job, as some of the "few" female computer scientists, to try and turn around these perceptions, and more importantly, to be the role models younger girls are looking for. How are you (or your classmates and coworkers) doing your part? I'd love to hear about it in the comments!

Jon Phillips: I missed the flame of shame in Guangzhou

Tue, 13 May 2008 09:17:10 +0000

Last week I took cc biz trip to Tokyo and missed the flame of shame outside our place in Guangzhou…totally bummed! Lu shot tons of HD footage of it and many photos of the endless security here…crazy!

Ryan Lerch: Australian Fedora Users: I will burn a Fedora 9 DVD for you!

Tue, 13 May 2008 00:36:18 +0000

If you live in Australia and don’t want to waste 4gB of your precious download limit on downloading fedora 9, I will happily burn a DVD for you! (i will be only downloading the i386 - Install DVD, so that is all i am able to burn for you…)

Here’s how:

Shoot me an email at ryanlerch at gmail dot com to get my mailing address.
Then, send me a stamped, self addressed envelope with a blank DVD in it.
I’ll burn the DVD for you, and pop it back in the post.
if you feel like it, do the same for someone else.

Hope i can help people out!

Jon Cruz: Next eraser toggle

Mon, 12 May 2008 00:18:06 +0000

I'd forgotten to point out that the mode toggle for the eraser tool showed up in SVN, along with the main eraser mode that it enables:

When that mode is enabled (which should be the default) the eraser tool acts more like a vector eraser than a raster eraser:

As you can see, it allows someone to zig-zag around and delete objects very selectively. The functional details need to be tuned up a bit, as it doesn't behave well with clicks as opposed to drags. However, it should be enough to see what the feel is and how it's different from the other mode.

Now all I have to do is get my tablet happy with Hardy and I can get those details like width, etc., nailed down.

MenTaLguY: Adobe Does Not Suck

Sat, 10 May 2008 19:31:08 +0000

(This is a follow-on to my post The Adobe Flash Player Deadlock)

I’ve been very pleased to see that, after my original post on March 9, many of my criticisms have been addressed, and I’ve learned that some were simply founded on poor communication. Let’s run through some of them.

Criticism: There is no way for the general public to report flash player bugs.

Originally, your options for reporting bugs were posting comments on a certain blog, or filling out the Adobe feature request form at http://www.adobe.com/go/wish. The blog wasn’t particularly encouraging since few of the issues raised there got addressed or even received a positive response (I’m also not linking to the blog because towards the end the exchanges between frustrated Linux users and a beleaguered Adobe project manager make both sides look needlessly bad).

I had also not been aware of the wishlist form as an accepted avenue for reporting bugs, but the current version of the page makes that a little more clear and easier to find in a search on Adobe’s site. However, the wishlist form still isn’t very ideal. Rather than a black hole to send “wishes” into, I’d really been hoping for a public bug tracker where you can actually see the fate of your problem report. Even Sun, in their most obnoxious days, had such a thing for Java.

Thankfully, as of April 8, Adobe finally has a public bug tracker for flash: http://bugs.adobe.com/flashplayer.

This criticism is now completely addressed.

(Many thanks to Marnen for filling me in on this point.)

Criticism: Adobe is not devoting sufficient resources to the Linux Flash player for it to remain viable.

I had based this criticism on Adobe’s public statements and history so far. After an initially promising release of Flash 9 (Linux Flash had previously languished buggily at verison 7 for an extended time), subsequent Flash 9 releases were increasingly infrequent and full of new regressions. Adobe was supposedly going to make a big push for Linux with the release of AIR, but when Adobe actually released AIR 1.0 in February, they omitted support for the Linux platform since (according to the AIR FAQ at the time) they had to “wait on the core Flash Player’s support for Linux to be finalized.” All these things together painted a very ominious picture for the future of Flash on Linux.

On March 30, however, Adobe released an alpha version of AIR for Linux, showing that they were making a serious effort to support the platform. I suspect that the reason for the falloff in Flash 9 support is the result of Adobe reallocating programming resources to Flash 10/AIR, although it would be nice if Adobe publicly announced their plans the same way that they did for 64-bit Photoshop, so people wouldn’t be left to conclude that, absent released software, they didn’t have any serious plans at all.

This criticism is probably unfounded to the extent that Adobe is doing the best they reasonably can as long as they are not accepting outside help by opening development of their own player (which itself would require a significant initial investment of resources that Adobe may not have).

However…

Criticism: There is no finalized release of the Flash player for Linux which is stable enough to use for development work.

It’s still the case that the latest Flash Player 9 takes out my browser multiple times an hour if I use it heavily (FlashBlock has helped mitigate this issue for casual use). Since Linux is my preferred development platform, there’s no way I could see myself developing for it until this changes.

(A few people have asked me why I think Adobe has to be altrustic and expend resources supporting Linux. They don’t, of course. But then I don’t have to be altrustic and bend over backwards to develop for an RIA platform that doesn’t have good support for the development platform I normally use either. Remember that the original post was about why I personally didn’t want to develop for Adobe’s platform.)

For now this criticism remains unaddressed, although with the alpha release of AIR for Linux I have hope that it might be addressed this year.

Criticism: Adobe is putting up roadblocks for open source Flash player implementations.

Even when Adobe finally published specifications for the flash format, they carried restrictions which prevented using them to implement your own flash player. Interviews with Adobe employees in the past had also indicated that Adobe was concerned about retaining control of its platform. Worse, in March they had announced their intent to make DRM part of the flash platform, introducing an additional obstacle for Open Source players.

However, just this month (May), Adobe launched the Open Screen Project and removed the restrictions on the use of their specifications. Some have called this a PR stunt, since the way it worked out Adobe hadn’t relaxed the restrictions on the specifications until all the information published in them had been reverse-engineered by the developer community anyway. However, I think calling it a PR stunt misses an important point—the Open Screen Project is specifically a signal that Adobe is no longer directly hostile to alternate Flash Player implementations.

This criticism is largely addressed; DRM remains an issue on the horizion, but Adobe’s public stance against non-Adobe players has clearly changed.

Criticism: Adobe doesn’t consider broad platform support for Flash to be important.

Historically, aside from Flash Lite (which is fairly different to the regular Flash platform), Adobe’s official support for Flash has mostly extended to PPC OS X and x86-32 OS X and Windows. There’s been the rather flaky and inconsistent support for x86-32 Linux (and the zombie-like revival of some version of the PPC Flash 7 plugin for the Wii), but that’s about it. The thing is, until you are able to support a certain number of platforms, the incremental cost of supporting each additional platform is extremely high. There’s essentially a knee in the graph, and Adobe is still quite far from reaching it.

As Sun discovered with Java, truly broad platform support is really only possible with an open source implementation of the platform. The community-developed zero-assembler Hotspot has enabled the JVM to be brought to a wide variety of new platforms which didn’t have Sun Java before with extremely little initial effort, and soon may start leveraging LLVM for cross-platform JIT performance. Flash will not be able to catch up in terms of platform support until at least one solid open source implementation of the Flash platform is available. On the evidence of the Open Screen Project, and their previous open-sourcing of the Tamarin runtime, I think Adobe finally realizes this.

I think this criticism was unfounded. Their release of Tamarin in November ought to have been a clue to me that they were waking up about this.

MenTaLguY: Blogging Again

Sat, 10 May 2008 17:18:28 +0000

Job stress had really gotten to me the past couple months, to the point where I really didn’t have the time or energy to blog. Now that I’ve made some needed changes, I’ve got quite a lot of ideas piled up to blog about. I will try to pace myself and do it in small chunks, to avoid a yeggesplosion.

Jos Hirth: Create TTFs Online with FontStruct (it's fun)

Sat, 10 May 2008 05:01:14 +0000

: Crispy glyphs.

Some of you might have seen FontStruct over at Slashdot. It was at the front page yesterday or the day before. The usual thing happened of course - it got slashdotted to death. Fortunately it's back online. It's time to give it a shot.

In a nutshell: FontStruct is a web-based font creation tool. Apart from a few minor issues the Flash-based interface is perfect. It's surprisingly awesome in fact. Well, it's not intended to be used for professional font creation; it doesn't handle kerning or hinting for example. There aren't even any vector tools (all you get is a set of building bricks). But all those things aren't really necessary for less-serious/pixel fonts.

Jon Cruz: Adding another little feature

Sat, 10 May 2008 02:16:11 +0000

So here I go, finally adding a little feature that's been kicking around for some time now.

The first half of it is done, but it's the half that notices changes and reloads that still needs to be worked on. Oh, and then there is also the half of trying to figure out what to invoke, and the half of needing to deal with embedded images...

Well... it's a start. Feedback on that bug would help get more things going.

Jon Cruz: What's This?

Sat, 10 May 2008 01:10:43 +0000

Interesting... so what's this that is showing up in my tools bar on the left, making Inkscape suck up even more vertical space?

Interesting... could it be something I'm coding, but haven't quite finished due to prep for LugRadio Live USA? Could be.

John Bintz: Video: The DC Conspiracy at Beyond Comics for Free Comic Book Day

Fri, 09 May 2008 21:46:32 +0000

Not since LGM2 have I put a video up on YouTube — I was just waiting for a good one to post, that’s all, and here it is!

Myself, Rafer Roberts, and Rebecca Simms (and Evan Keeling, but I left before he arrived) were all at Beyond Comics in Frederick for Free Comic Book Day. For the two or so hours I was up there it was pretty sweet. I gave away a lot of minicomics, and I know the other DCC members did well for themselves. I also had the opportunity to talk with the very cool owner of Beyond Comics, Jon Cohen. Watch and enjoy.

Thanks to Alex for running the videocamera, and, of course, the entire movie (except for the music which was from Garageband) was edited using Open Source software.

Gail Carmichael: Mini-Course: Finished

Fri, 09 May 2008 17:18:32 +0000

I guess you could say there's a reason I didn't post anything about my mini-course for days two through four. That reason is quite simple: I was too tired and had too little time to write whilst preparing my slides for the next day! I guess this is what happens when you prepare a course for the first time - I'm sure next year will be easier... right? Right?? :)

In all seriousness, though, I am so happy with how the week went that I can hardly put it into words. So I'll begin with a summary of what we did after day one, and end with an attempt to capture my feelings as they are just two hours after it all ended.

On Tuesday, we kicked things off with some material on game design. I wanted to squeeze a bit of that in before we started working on our own games in the lab, but also wanted to give as much lab time as possible, so I only did an hour's worth of lecturing before moving on. In the afternoon we were back in the classroom, and covered topics of usability, using principles from Donald Norman's Design of Everyday Things. I used CS Unplugged's Chocolate Factory activity to get the girls thinking about issues of design.

I spent some time on Wednesday morning talking about computer graphics. This was a tricky one, since the theory behind it is pretty complicated. I wanted it to be mostly understandable, yet deep enough to make the class feel like they actually learned something. So I didn't spend much time on it, but gave a flavour of what vector and raster graphics were, as well as what some of the topics of 3D graphics would be. I even showed that first movie made in Blender, Elephant's Dream. I capped off the morning with the rest of my game design material, and we spent the afternoon in the lab again.

For both Thursday and Friday mornings, we worked in the lab finishing up our games. I covered some basic artificial intelligence on Thursday afternoon, talking mainly about finite state machines and the Turing test (again using two activities from CS Unplugged). I particularly enjoyed the discussion we had about AI, since the class had an unusually good insight into how computers worked and what they were capable of. They understood inherently that computers essentially stored information and could maybe deduce new things from it, but that they couldn't do anything we didn't tell it to do (I did tell them a bit about neural nets, which seem to be more like learning, but not so much in the sense we humans do).

Finally, we grouped a couple of the games classes together Friday afternoon and tried out each others' creations. I think the boys were definitely impressed with what we were able to do.

I kind of already mentioned one of the reasons that I am so happy about this course, and that is the awesome discussions we were able to have. These girls are so smart! What's more is that they looked genuinely interested, not just while in the lab, but in the classroom as well. When I asked if anyone was interested in trying computer science out in high school, they pretty much all said yes! Wow! I thought if I had made even one or two interested, then I would have succeeded in my mission. I really hope they can find joy in the subject as they get older, because I can tell you right now, they have HUGE potential.

So that about sums up my very first experience teaching a real class. I hope this is just the beginning! Watch this space for some more info about my course notes. I may post them for all to see, and if so, I'll link to them here.

Jon Phillips: links for 2008-05-09

Fri, 09 May 2008 00:49:15 +0000

BBC NEWS | Technology | TorrentSpy ordered to pay $110m

This is bullshit. What year is this?

(tags: copyright, 2008, bittorrent, pirates, sharing)

Ryan Lerch: The Fedora Community & encouragement…

Thu, 08 May 2008 22:46:52 +0000

Even though I have only been an active member of the fedora community for about a month now, something happened about an hour ago just to reinforce how awesome the community is. I was reading the fedora-art mailing list this morning, and was pleased to read a short and sweet message from Jon Roberts that contained encouraging words about the art-team’s echo icons project. So thanks Jon!

I would also like to jump on the encouragement bandwagon and give a shout out to the fedora-docs team and thank them for the awesome Desktop User Guide, which has been a valuable source of information for myself in making the switch to Linux and Fedora.

Niko Kiirala: LGM has begun

Thu, 08 May 2008 11:44:06 +0000

The Libre Graphics Meeting 2008 has now begun and I'm here. I arrived yesterday and it's been a bit of a crash course to life in Poland. Stuffed buses, not having a common language with shop clerks, trying to find a place where to eat and all that. But I am now here at the conference hall and I've already have met several interesting people and heard of some completely new projects. For these

John Bintz: Joining the cartoon party: Myself as a Teen

Thu, 08 May 2008 01:57:59 +0000

I’m joining the party…

I was also going to draw my older self, but then I got lazy.

Niko Kiirala: When PCI is not PCI

Tue, 06 May 2008 23:30:00 +0000

This week I bought two new peripherials for my computer: an USB 2.0 controller card and a sound card. Before you ask, yes, neither of those are integrated on the motherboard. Originally it wasn't a desktop machine but a server. The first problem I encountered was when I tried to insert the A-Link U2P4 USB 2.0 controller in a PCI slot. It just didn't fit. The PCI connector on the controller had

Jos Hirth: Improve Your Documentation with Generated Directory Listings (XHTML/Text)

Tue, 06 May 2008 04:41:40 +0000

: There shall be structure.

Benefits

Hierarchical structures are always rather hard to explain with words alone. You've to identify the key items and then lay out their relation to each other - two at a time. This can take a couple of sentences and you'll also have to carefully check if everything is at the right place.

But it doesn't stop there. The worst part is probably that every user will have to parse your explanation very carefully. Of course that only adds a few seconds to the whole process, but those seconds accumulate. Your thousands (or even millions) of users might have done something more important during that time. They could have picked their nose for example, which is an activity many people enjoy more than reading documentation.

Yes, it's true. Reading documentation is really that exciting. So, we really should try everything possible to make it as quick and pain free as possible.

Gail Carmichael: Mini-Course: Day One Complete

Mon, 05 May 2008 16:26:30 +0000

Phew!

Yesterday was the official orientation session, where we showed students and their parents around to the classroom and game lab, and today was the first actual day of classes. I think both went well!

At orientation, the parents seemed quite enthusiastic. The girls were quieter, but eventually asked lots of questions, which I thought was a good sign. They wanted to know how much time we were going to spend in the lab, how we were going to make the games, and what I meant by "you don't need to code."

The first student arrived to class shortly after I did (20 minutes early!). After I set up my laptop with the projector, I played a movie from the Good Game show, just for something to do before everyone arrived. I found that the projector played movies ok on the default settings, but that my slides looked pretty bad. I actually went into my video card's colour settings and brought down the brightness so my slides looked good, but then videos got worse. Can't win them all.

Once everyone had arrived, I dove right into my introduction slides. I talked about who I was, and asked them to interview each other to see where they were from and why they signed up for the course (they either said it was because it looked "cool" or because they wanted to know how video games or computers worked).

We talked about what computer science in general was, including the many other areas of interest it could be combined with (like psychology, biology, mathematics, and so on). There was a brief definition / introduction to games, and then a quick idea of how (in my opinion at least) the two were well related.

The next major section was to talk about women in computing. I particularly enjoyed this topic because they girls were really tuned in on the issues. They brought up ideas and suggestions on why few females get into the field, and how to fix it, that showed a lot of insight, and even agreed with the literature. When I had them read pieces of articles, then discuss their pieces with the rest of the readers of the same article, they seemed to have interested looks on their faces. They did an awesome job relaying the main points of the content they read to the rest of the class. Definitely a smart bunch!

Finally, in the afternoon, we went to the game development lab and went through some tutorials on GameMaker. Everyone just worked at their own pace, and when they were done the tutorial, they played around with their own ideas. From what I could tell, we should be getting some really good games out of them by the end of the week!

So that was my first day's experience of my very first time teaching a real class. I think the only thing I really need to improve is my knowledge of GameMaker for tomorrow's lab time. Speaking of which, gotta go finish up that tutorial I started a moment ago...

Jon Phillips: The Real Carbon Offset

Sat, 03 May 2008 17:12:45 +0000

For anyone trying to offset your carbon footprint: Get a shovel, dig a hole, and bury yourself. I’ll take volunteers to do this first and I will document the whole process from start to near finish.

Jon Phillips: Photos from Guangzhou China Town Demolitions and Linux Photo Sharing Question

Sat, 03 May 2008 06:17:39 +0000

AhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhHHHHHHHHHhhhhhh! Our time in Guangzhou is nearing an end for this spell. I have not adequately covered what Lu and I have been up to. Here are some immediate photos taken of Guangzhou which illustrate the dynamism of where we live right now.

Photos below by Lu Fang under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

We discovered this village a couple of blocks from our house was being destroyed to make way for new housing and skyscrapers which you’ll see at the end of this.

Also, a few of my colleagues will be happy to note that a W hotel and Ritz-Carlton are being built on these grounds — ironies abound. The other day as well, helped my wife’s parents plant some plants. They wanted me to help dig out this huge *rock* in the ground. That rock happened to be a big multi-colored chunk of rubble from the village that lays under where we live — some kind of rock!

I need to get into photo dumping online. What is the linux workflow that others use to get photos from camera, to desktop, to flickr, Internet Archive, etc? I just took a hard look at just uploading all my photos to Internet Archive, but the interfaces are not there for photo fun nor conversion to other formats, and the biggest part is lack of active community. Any thoughts?

Jon Phillips: Obama 2008 Has Already Won Discussion with Chinese Granpda Agong

Sat, 03 May 2008 06:01:50 +0000

Lu’s grandpa, Agong, who is 97 years young, asked me why the American elections take so long. This is a daily occurrence here in Guangzhou, especially in the south of china, as many are convinced that some form of democracy or rule by the people is coming. It is just a matter of time. This is one of the unwritten rules of China: the farther you get from the capital, the more people speak their minds. You could also say the further people get away from Beijing, the more lawlessness, but that is another story altogether (I would also say the other unwritten rule is that as long as you phrase anything in terms of business, you are better off with the government. So instead of addressing problems with GFW in terms of censorship of free speech, address it in terms of increased transactions costs and bad business — in what business is getting 70% of your order ever okay?)

Anyway, I didn’t have a great answer to Agong this time, and conceded that this battle between Obama and Clinton has gone on way too long. Look at the intrade charts! Come on!

2008 US Presidential Elections

Source: Dynamic, compound prediction market charts from InTrade

2008 US Presidential Election Winner - Individual

And, while yes, I agree that Obama is elitist, my daily read of the commercially focused American media is compared against the intrade charts.

SO, at the end of the day I told Agong, “Obama has already won the democratic nominee and the presidential race is a lot closer.” Of course, something abominable could happen to derail this prediction market, but it is super crucial to get Hillary out of the race now and focus all conceptual and ideological nukes onto McCain. Geez, does McCain represent you? Obama! Obama! Temporary Dictator is the best of the worst as I’ve previously pushed At least there is some feeling that the common persons efforts are connected to the presidential selection compared to selection of the temporary dictator in China. So with that being said, that is the most nationalism you are going to see out of me, quite unlike the red-guard-like red nationalism inside of China directed at CNN and French-connected Carrefour.

Jon Phillips: links for 2008-05-03

Sat, 03 May 2008 00:54:14 +0000

信息时报 - 2008年4月26日 - AT4:酷玩集中营版 - 装置艺术：非花样，实验中的形式

Cool, Lu got some press about her artwork in Chinese news publication

(tags: art china network lufang deerfang 2008 guangzhou online print press hit presshit)

Niko Kiirala: Filter effects: Composite

Fri, 02 May 2008 13:05:35 +0000

This is part of my filter effects tutorial series. Composite is, as the name states, an effect that can composite images together. It uses the Porter-Duff blending modes named after the writers of the paper, where it was published. For those of you with ACM Digital Library access, here's a link to the original paper: Compositing Digital Images: Porter, Duff. The Porter-Duff blending modes are

Jon Phillips: OCWC Conference in Dalian 2008 and Beijing

Fri, 02 May 2008 08:56:28 +0000

Jose speaking about Knowledge Hub at the Open Ed conference in Dalian, China, Photo by Tom Caswell

I just arrived back home in Guangzhou, China from the OpenCourseWare Conference in Dalian, China last weekend and met many great people (but don’t have the tolerance to write out the contents of my thoughts ;), had many fruitful discussions, and rocked out a good slide deck for ccLearn (and you!). Check out my presentation (or any of my presentations and here), “OER XinXai (NOW!)“:

OER XinXai (NOW)! Dalian OCWC Conference 2008 - Upload a doc

Read this doc on Scribd: OER XinXai (NOW)! Dalian OCWC Conference 2008

The most fruitful part of the conference for me was interacting with Philip Schmidt, Victor from Hewlett Foundation, Chunyan Wang from CC Mainland China, and Stewart Cheifet from Internet Archive. Also, hearing about sustain-o-bility in all its forms as a major consideration for projects, and mentions of CC+, made me quite happy. It also served as a nice place to test out my Mandarin skills for the good or worse of things. Hopefully at the next conference there will be more time for discussion during the conference days.

I jumped up on stage to give a final call for participation to the ccLearn and OER regional meeting at iSummit July 29 - August 1 in order to increase participation by principals in the region. Let’s hope it worked!

After this conference, I directly headed to Beijing where I worked with CC Mainland China team on accelerating business development and assessing great projects which would be great to integrate Creative Commons licensing. If you have an organization in China or any jurisdiction and want to help in this process, check out the page CC Web Integration.

The next stop for me is to head to celebrate Lu’s 27th birthday on May 4th, then onto Japan to meet up Joi, Catharina, Fumi and more (ken!). Then back to Guangzhou, Beijing, then back to Guangzhou, then back in San Francisco May 21 through at least end of July as homebase. Cheers!

Jon Phillips: links for 2008-05-02

Fri, 02 May 2008 00:42:52 +0000

olafur eliasson show pictures of light artwork

Cool sculptures and show from sfmoma

(tags: art newmedia sfmoma moma contemporary kanyewest)
Science Commons » The Health Commons

John Wilbanks is brilliant and the work Science Commons is doing here is totally amazing and a force to keep tabs on!

(tags: johnwilbanks friend personal sciencecommons presentation)

Ryan Lerch: Fedora 9 animated banner - take 2

Fri, 02 May 2008 00:16:06 +0000

Okies, here is the v.2 of the fedora 9 banner that i originally posted yesterday…

And here is v.1 from yesterday for comparison:

Despite what I said yesterday, i am pretty happy with both designs, so i will post the sources up on the fedora wiki

Inkscape Tutorials: drawing gears in inkscape - a howto by nicu.

Thu, 01 May 2008 02:18:14 +0000

UPDATE: Nicu has been posting incremental updates on this tutorial on his blog… to date there are 3 parts in total:

After the last few posts not being actual tutorials, today the inkscape tutorials weblog is getting back into the swing of things with an awesome little howto from nicu.

Nicu demonstrates how to create gears in inkscape, vary them and build them up to create complex “mechanisms”

Ryan Lerch: Fedora 9 animated banner

Thu, 01 May 2008 00:18:45 +0000

Here is a quick banner that i threw together in Inkscape + the GIMP for the upcoming Fedora 9 release. I dont think this is the one that ill submit officially to fedora-art, but i wanted to throw it up so people can see it.

I’m not fully happy with the positioning of the text that appears at the end, but ill fix that up later…
Shoot me a message if you are on the fedora-art team and want the source files (.xcf, .svg and all the frames in .png)

Jon Cruz: Enhancing tablet support

Wed, 30 Apr 2008 22:43:52 +0000

For some time I have been wanting to help with tablet support in Inkscape. Things have finally come together enough for me to get started. We've had at least one RFE on this for a while (bug #171265)

The first step of this is in, and now has a preference setting to enable switching the Inkscape tool as different devices are used on the tablet (pen tip, eraser, mouse, etc.)

The implementation will probably need a bit of testing and refinement, but it should be ready for users to check out. The coding is not that difficult; most of the real effort is with figuring out the behavior that needs to happen.

At the moment the tool switched to is always the same for the same tool, but very shortly it will remember the last tool used. In the long run I'll probably be replacing our use of GdkInputDialog to provide easier configuration.

However, the main thing missing is how different tablet setups are configured. Multiple pens, multiple tablets, non-Wacom tablets, etc. That's where feedback from end-users and testers really comes in handy.

Jon Cruz: First phase of tool committed

Wed, 30 Apr 2008 22:43:16 +0000

Here it is...

The first part of the code for my new "eraser tool" for Inkscape is in trunk now. I've been working on the use cases probably more than the code even. However this is now a starting point for people to look at and start complaining. :-)

This first part only adds in the functionality to cut away parts of objects you have selected. It won't do anything if you don't have something selected, and it won't do anything if the first mode is selected (the sub-toolbar has toggles for the two modes). However it does commit all the infrastructure changes including the new icons, new drawing context, verbs, switching, etc. I had been wanting to get that in first to shake down bugs in that support work.

Moving forward I'll implement the "touch-delete" mode, and support for working when no selection is made. Probably a few more enhancements will come in as people try it out and give some feedback. I'm most excited about the pending "touch-delete", since it has a feel that strikes me as very "vector" and can differentiate the usage from raster drawing packages.

John Bintz: Quick Drying Paint: Profiling Inkscape using Valgrind

Wed, 30 Apr 2008 14:00:25 +0000

A faster Paint Bucket in Inkscape means that I make my comics faster, which means I can finish “Candynomics” before I turn 30. The first version of Paint Bucket was pretty much just a proof-of-concept, and was very slow (but faster than the alternative of coloring using the Pen tool, which drove me batty). The second version got a little more clever at analyzing the area to be painted, which brought out a modest speed improvement. For the most recent change, which involved hooking deeper into the potrace bitmap tracing engine, I used Valgrind and KCachegrind to analyze all the steps of a fill operation and to find any potential bottlenecks.

Inkscape uses libgc to handle garbage collection, which is a good thing, except for when you want to profile Inkscape using Valgrind. Valgrind and libgc don’t get along too well, but luckily you can disable the use of libgc in Inkscape with an environment variable.

Additionally, profiling all of Inkscape in Valgrind, and more specifically callgrind, is an excruciating process. Valgrind allows you to disable instrumentation — the gathering of function call statistics, a very slow operation — at the start of the application’s execution, and then turn instrumentation on later in the life of the application, say when you’re about to paint an area of the drawing.

To profile a development build of Inkscape with Valgrind, with instrumentation disabled by default, cd to your build directory and execute the following from a bash shell:

_INKSCAPE_GC=disable valgrind --tool=callgrind --instr-atstart=no src/inkscape

Inkscape will start up…very, very slowly. When you’re ready to profile, run in another shell:

callgrind_control -i on

And callgrind will start recording function calls. Perform the operations you want to profile (the more the better if your machine is fast enough — I performed about 3-4 bucket fills in my testing, which was enough for this purpose), then in your second shell:

callgrind_control -i off

You can kill the valgrind process with [Ctrl]-C once callgrind_control reports that instrumentation is off.

When you’re done profiling, you’ll get a callgrind.out file in the build directory, with a number at the end that is the PID of the valgrind/inkscape process. Move this file somewhere else (I like ~/Desktop) and fire up KCachegrind.

I’ve done a lot of profiling of PHP applications (using Xdebug, a very very useful PHP extension), but essentially nothing of desktop applications. Luckily, the same general process applies to desktop apps:

Sort functions by number of calls. See if any function is being called more than it should be.
Sort functions by call time. See if any function is taking a very very long time.
Check the call graph of the bigger functions. Look for anything suspicious.
Tackle the biggest offenders first. Don’t waste time squeezing an extra 1% out of the app if it takes you 20 hours to get it (unless you really want to )

In my case, #3 was what tipped me off to what was going on: after calling Inkscape’s potrace engine to trace the fill bitmap, the engine was calling a function called filter() which seemed to be taking a while to execute. I took a look at what was going on, and saw that filter() was generating a grayscale version of the bitmap fill to be traced, and then passing this along to the tracing engine.

The filter that was being applied was geared more toward generic image filtering, where the input could be anything. My input from Paint Bucket is quite specific, so I decided to try an end-run around the filtering system. After about 20 minutes of refactoring and new coding, I re-ran Inkscape in Valgrind, did some fills, and after comparing the costs of the removed filter function and the new costs of my own filtering, the process was faster!

So in conclusion: if you have spots in your code that are CPU-intensive, or just plain slow, running them through a profiler like Valgrind (or for PHP, Xdebug) can help you determine if it’s a problem in your code and where that problem may be.

Gail Carmichael: Anita Borg Scholar

Wed, 30 Apr 2008 12:37:13 +0000

Remember that Google scholarship I told you about back in November? It was the Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship that was to be awarded to Canadian students for the first time. Well, I have been waiting to let you all know how I fared, but wanted to let Google post about it officially first.

Now that they have, I can tell you that I am a finalist, and am excitedly getting ready to head to New York, New York tomorrow morning (getting to the airport at 5am, ugh) for an all-expenses paid retreat with the other scholarship finalists and winners, as well as Googlers. One person I'm really looking forward to meeting is my contact for the Google Ambassador Program, since she happens to work at the New York office.

I will, of course, be posting much about the trip, including lots of photos!

Jos Hirth: Disabling Windows XP's Mouse Acceleration

Wed, 30 Apr 2008 08:08:35 +0000

This should be easy, right? Well, for reasons unknown to me it isn't. Win2k/98/95 got two sliders: one for sensitivity and one for acceleration. This was great. This was easy. WinXP, however, assumes you always want to use some degree of acceleration - unless you're using the lowest sensitivity setting, which is quite frankly unusable. This is really irritating - especially if you consider that people who disable acceleration typically use a rather high sensitivity. There is only one slider which controls both settings and there is a check box, which can be used to "improve" the sensitivity... whatever that means.

Why am I writing about this anyways? There should be zillions of pages about that topic, shouldn't it? Well, while that's true all I saw so far only contain some nonsense. And they all copy&pasted from each other. Gee. That really helps.

Gail Carmichael: Mini-Course: Udpated Look

Tue, 29 Apr 2008 20:26:04 +0000

Thanks to some of the comments I've received on my previous design, I was motivated to work on the "look" of my mini-course a little longer. This is what I came up with. I would love to know what you think, though I probably won't be able to do any major changes at this stage (unless this attempt proves disastrous!). Also, I forgot to mention last time that the title of a set of slides will go in the white space under the main heading.

Gail Carmichael: Mini-Course: Outline

Tue, 29 Apr 2008 13:05:30 +0000

As the start of my mini-course on computer science and games designed specifically for girls draws ever nearer, I have been excitedly finishing up an outline with my course's contents. I have a lot of detail written out, but just wanted to share a brief outline for now. Note that one of the reasons for organizing things the way I did is to ensure there is a good level of variety between videos and activities, and not too much "lecturing" in a row. Furthermore, about two or three hours a day will be spent working on an actual game using Game Maker.

Without further ado, here it is!

Computer Science and Games: Not Just for Boys!

Part I: Games and Computer Science

Introduction
Computer Science and Games
Not Just for Boys
Preview of Course

Part II: Game Design

What is a Game?
Key Components
Introduction to Game Maker
Design Process 1: Concept Stage
Design Process 2: The Elaboration Stage
Design Process 3: The Tuning Stage
Starting Your Own Concept
Game Worlds
Gameplay
Other Topics You Can Learn About
Refining Your Concept

Part III: Usability and Design

Why Good Design Matters
Principles of Good Design
How to Learn About Your Users
This is Computer Science?
User Experience for Games

Part IV: Graphics

Vector vs. Raster
3D Objects in the Computer
3D Objects on a 2D Screen
Other 3D Graphics Concepts
3D Graphics Demo
Alice

Part V: Audio

Using Audacity
Challenges With Game Audio

Part VI: Artificial Intelligence

Why AI Is Important For Games
Examples of AI in Games
Using Finite State Machines

Jos Hirth: A Toaster, a Hard Disk, and a Dud

Tue, 29 Apr 2008 03:36:49 +0000

: mmm... crispy sectors

It's toast

The weekend started with a premonition. Well, maybe "bad omen" is more accurate. Some rather bad SQL errors showed up, but they were sorted out quickly. The next day the site disappeared. "403 - forbidden", it said. That's just great. Did I already mention that I'm amazingly unlucky these days?

Page 403s, FTP says the password is wrong, but email works. So, I waited for the phone support hours to start. Gee. Fast forward about an hour and I got some techy to talk to. Apparently some HDD failed, it got replaced, some files were wiped (well, all of them - except for some now empty directories), and some access rights were nuked as well.

Gail Carmichael: Mini-Course: The "Look"

Mon, 28 Apr 2008 22:37:29 +0000

Here's a bit of a teaser for my upcoming mini-course. It defines the "look" I'm giving to my slides and notes and such. What do you think? Will the 13 year old girls like it?

(I should note that I would have made the controller in the background lighter, but I know the projector I will be using doesn't display light gray very well, so I just wanted to ensure it actually showed up!)

Gail Carmichael: WISE and Balancing Research and Life

Mon, 28 Apr 2008 21:53:28 +0000

The next year or so is going to be an exciting one for the Women in Science and Engineering here at Carleton University. That's right, there's a new branch of WISE Ottawa in town! Thanks to a group of enthusiastic women who see a bright future for females in our field, the Carleton branch of WISE is in the process of being reformed, and already has a few great events under its belt.

There's a lot of work to do this summer, like finding a way to brand ourselves with a fresh new logo, and finishing up a new website, but things are looking really good. We had a couple of talks during the winter semester, including one with Google door prizes and delicious food. I'd like to focus on that one for the rest of this post.

The poster for our April event can still be found here. Our guest speaker was Kamilla Run Johannsdottir, PhD., and she spoke about her experiences with balancing life in research with family.

I know that I personally found this talk very interesting and informative. Being recently married and hoping to have kids before I'm 30, I really wanted to know when the best time was according to someone who has already done it.

Kamilla had her kids after getting her PhD, largely based on when she actually got married and therefore had the opportunity. She had decided to work a couple of years in a full time position before having her first child. A large part of this decision came from the fact that the first few years as a professor can be very stressful and demanding. Apparently newbies often have to work very hard to impress their superiors with their performance in order to prove themselves. This makes it difficult to have the flexibility required when you are the mother of a young child.

Kamilla's talk was very good, especially because she promoted an excellent discussion session afterwards. From this, I think I concluded that, since I do have to opportunity, the best time to have kids would be after courses and comprehensives during the PhD, but before the end when the thesis needs to be defended. Apparently, even the part-time hours available to work on the thesis are enough to get by during that period. It was relieving and encouraging to get this kind of information, even though it may not apply when the time comes.

As usual, we served food at this event, thanks to the Faculty of Engineering and the Google Ambassador program. In addition, both Google and the Carleton Bookstore were very generous and provided us with some goodies to give away as door prizes.

At the end of the evening, we facilitated some discussion to get feedback on how the girls liked our events and what they'd like to see in the future. Some of the ideas included having a summer get together to play Frisbee or soccer, talks on public speaking, talks for elementary and high school students, a mentoring program, frosh week events, financial help in attending conferences for women in the field, advice on transitioning from high school to university, and a few talks focussed on industry. Like I said, the coming year should be really exciting, so stay tuned!

Niko Kiirala: Animal test subjects

Mon, 28 Apr 2008 13:46:15 +0000

I noticed some time ago that using five pointed stars as example material is growing a bit old. I needed something new to test these filters with. So, I came up with the idea of using animal test subjects. Here are the two: Max and Gina. While animal testing can be cruel and inhumane, I promise to treat my two test subjects kindly. You'll be seeing them in new Filter Effects tutorials shortly.

Jon Phillips: Thanks to the Fedora Project, LGM Goal Met

Mon, 28 Apr 2008 07:04:07 +0000

I wanted to send a big thank you out to The Fedora Project, Max Spevack and Greg DeKoenigsberg for their support of the upcoming Libre Graphics Meeting 2008 in Poland, May 8 - 11!

Dave Neary wrote a good overview of the state of the massively successful fundraiser we put together with Pledgie.com (try it out if you want to raise money for your cause!).

It is still not too late to donate money (you can use paypal with the previous link which will help get more developers to the event. Cheers to all who gave too and linked to the various posts thus truly shedding light onto the huge community of free and open source graphics users and developers out there in the world

Kees Cook: Farwell Edgy

Sat, 26 Apr 2008 02:39:41 +0000

Edgy is now officially at end-of-life.

Looking back through my build logs, I can see that my desktop spent 55 hours, 14 minutes, and 3 seconds on 406 builds related to edgy-security updates I was involved in publishing. These times obviously don’t include patch hunting/development, failed builds, testing, stuff done on my laptop or the porting machines, etc. Comparing to my prior post on this topic, here are the standings for other releases:

dapper: 44:48:24
feisty: 58:49:04
gutsy: 37:06:08
hardy: 86:25:58

Hmm… I think my hardy numbers include devel builds times… I’ll have to sort that out. :)

Thank you Edgy! I will remember you for your wonderful default -fstack-protector.

Jon Cruz: Freedom from size tyrrany

Fri, 25 Apr 2008 23:19:19 +0000

Inkscape now has tweaked toolbar size preferences. Why is this? Well the main thing is that it makes the UI more usable on Ubuntu again. There have been some ongoing issues with size, many of which are due to the use of custom toolbars from before GTK+ had stock ones.

A while back I added some options to use 'secondary toolbar' size for the main tools on the left (and the top bar also), but for some users that did not help. Between Inkscape 0.46 being released and me recently getting a laptop with a very small screen (thanks Dice and LugRadio Live), I've been getting more done on that front.

After seeing more bug report activity on it, especially from people running on fixed 1024x768 monitors, I tracked down a bit more. The main issue is that while Inkscape is properly respecting the user's GTK+ theme for sizes of icons, the people setting those themes up for Ubuntu, among others, had chosen to set the two toolbar icons sizes to the same. So switching from using the primary size to the secondary size did nothing to help, as it just switched from 24x24 to 24x24.

So on the one hand the theme designers are imposing their idea of how things will be pretty, but on the other we were facing imposing our idea on what would make things more functional. Either way seems bad. So after splitting this specific issue to its own bug (#221676), I settled in and added enough preferences so that now the end user can decide what they want to do, and on a per-platform basis.

The change reduced the minimum size from the old 652x735 to now be 600x583, just over a 20% reduction in vertical size required. The big gain there is that it should no longer be pushing things for Ubuntu users on lower-res LCD monitors. Additionally now when I flip over from OS X to Linux, I'll be able to keep the smaller icons showing up that make my workflow go faster.

Of course that does tend to mess with the crispness of some of the icons... but if people care about that they can just set the sizes back. In the long run we have plans to address that, but for now at least the work-arounds should be sufficient.

Gail Carmichael: The Power of a Blog

Fri, 25 Apr 2008 18:03:08 +0000

I have to say that I am both surprised and impressed at the power a simple blog such as mine can possess. After all, I write as a hobby, not for any kind of gain, financial or otherwise. Yet the exposure my posts have brought seems to be opening many opportunities!

For example, when I wrote about having some fun with accelerometers, somebody from Kionix (the company that makes the devices we used in class) contacted me and wanted to know if I'd like my own accelerometer to play with. Well, sure - why not!

Then I posted a comment on a story I saw on reddit about my mini-course. Count 'em: not one, but two people followed my link and liked what I was doing enough to write me an email! The first person was highly involved in the movement to get more women interested in computing, and the second was a researcher in computer science education. I think both will be excellent contacts for some future projects I've been cooking up in my mind.

And just a couple of days ago, I received a fairly random phone call from somebody at school. Apparently they had read my post about the Donor Dinner I attended and really liked what I wrote. Enough that those in charge of preparing the donor report for 2007 want to include some of my text in the final version of the publication! What's more, they want to use a photo of me to go with it. I will be having a little photo shoot this Wednesday.

Every time something like this happens I get really excited, which makes the time spent writing worth it. If you write a blog but aren't sure that people actually read it, just keep at it. You might be surprised to learn who's had a look!