You are in a maze of twisty passages, all different; a life of many interests
| geek, lifeSomeday, I’m going to look back and all the different threads of my life will make sense. =) It’s all in preparation for something very interesting, I’m sure.
Each twist adds another dimension to what I’ve already been able to do. Geeking out (grade school) turned into programming competitions (high school) turned into open source development (university) turned into blogging (also university) turned into research (master’s) turned into consulting and application development (now), which draws on blogging and open source development.
It seems this year I’m adding two ingredients to the mix: illustration and event organization. Today, I reached another personal milestone for event organization (hosted my first large teleconference with an external speaker; plenty of lessons learned!), and I reached another personal milestone for illustration and visual thinking (started making glyphs for fonts!). We’ll see how that goes. =)
I still enjoy getting into the flow with lots of code and bugfixes in the morning, and I’m slowly making progress on the Emacs book. (Thanks, Ian, for keeping me honest.) But learning new stuff is tones of fun, -and it’s interesting bringing everything together.
On a technical note:
I checked out the latest version of Inkscape from the Subversion source tree and I compiled it for our desktop, as that’s what the tablet is plugged into. I had come across Inkscape 0.47’s feature list while looking for the best way to get font glyphs into FontForge, and the new features are pretty cool.
I can’t wait to play around with this! =)
1 comment
David Ing
2009-01-31T04:00:53ZSacha, I'm intrigued that you're using Inkscape. You're way more artistic than I am, and you've got a tablet, so you're way beyond me.
I've been doing vector drawings since the mid-1990s, first in Lotus Freelance Graphics ... and then when the client interest pushed that direction, had to move to the dreaded Microsoft Powerpoint. There was actually enough drawing functionality in Freelance, but Powerpoint is pretty hopeless.
I've really been waiting for browsers to catch up to SVG, so my drawing choices have been oriented that way. I discovered that it's possible to take Open Office Draw diagrams, export them as SVG, manually edit the first line of code -- I don't remember exactly how -- and open them up in Inkscape just fine. The SVG directly out of OOo Draw didn't work well in browsers (at least when I tried it, a year ago), whereas the SVG out of Inkscape works just fine.
So why don't I use Inkscape? I was having problems reusing the drawings in presentations (e.g. Microsoft Powerpoint, OOo Impress, Lotus Symphony Presentations), and in documents (e.g. OOo Write, Microsoft Word). Since Inkscape is native in SVG, it seems to have a larger vocabulary than other programs can handle ... and then we're back into exporting bitmap graphics.
Inkscape export into OOo Draw doesn't work consistently. Thus, I've found the pragmatic solution to be primarily OOo Draw first, and Inkscape later ... maybe.
In the drawings that I have to do, I hope that they file formats (i.e. Open Document Format) are sufficiently stable that I'll be able open up the documents ten years after they've been created. I've still got Freelance for OS/2 files on my archive!