Yearly Archives: 2003

Put out a new release of fontilus, which increased the number of supported languages from 2 (including the default english) to 21. It also has a few small UI improvements for the font view dialog, and adds a context menu item for fonts in the “fonts:” folder that allows you to easily set the default application font for Gnome.

You can also now use fontilus to view the Bitstream Vera fonts. The fonts are currently available in a limited beta form (you can download and use the fonts, but not redistribute them). The terms that will be used for the finished version of the fonts is also available at the above site, which probably meets the open source definition (some people think it doesn’t, but the license seems to satisfy all the points in the definition).

lmjohns3: if you use a locale with right to left text direction, GTK+ will automatically flip the direction of standard widgets.

This means that if you have a GtkHBox, items added with pack_start() will end up on the right hand side of the box, and ones added with pack_end() on the left (after all, they aren’t called pack_left and pack_right).

To see what happens, try out the “flipping” test in the testgtk program included with GTK.

freetype: I have a “beta” version of the Vera fonts, and they are in TrueType format. I think it is safe to assume the final version will also be in TrueType format.

The Vera fonts are based on the Prima fonts if you want to see more samples. The copies I have display quite nicely with recent freetype versions (using the autohinter). The slides for my presentation at linux.conf.au were displayed with the Vera fonts. They didn’t look as good as they might have because MagicPoint still uses freetype1 🙁

The fonts should be available to the general public in about a month (or maybe a bit less). Jim has done a great job with this.

The second day of talks went well. That night we had the conference dinner which went pretty well. We continued the tradition of auctioning off a conference tshirt signed by all the speakers. This year’s tshirt was also signed by many of the people who attended the kernel summit at OLS. The winning bid was made by the people at the Sun table for about AU$2100.

Everyone had a good time, although a few had too much to drink. We ended up having to take one to hospital, where he spent a night. He was okay in the morning though. This is something the next conf organisers should take into account.

The talks on Saturday went pretty well (including mine). After a year of telling me how much better PPC laptops were, jdub ended up borrowing my laptop to give his presentation because his one had no VGA connector.

A group shot of all the speakers and some of the organisers was taken as well.

The closing ceremony was pretty good. We gave out bottles of “Holy Penguin Pee” to all the speakers. I haven’t been able to find a photo of these online yet. I am pretty proud of of the labels, as I did the layout myself.

At the closing, it was also announced that the next LCA will be held in Adelaide, followed by Canberra in 2005.

A Speex file is available from the LCA website containing the audio from the Q&A session. It came out at 3.4MB for about 45 minutes. This is the format we will be encoding all the audio in for distribution on CD.

On the Sunday I didn’t do much, as I was exhausted. I cycled into the city to see the Australia Day fireworks in the evening though. They were pretty good this year. It looked like they were using about 6 zodiacs to launch smaller fireworks, in addition to the larger barges. A great ending to a great conference.

Update: a picture of the Holy Penguin Pee. If you look at the larger version you can see a bit more of the penguin silhouette. Another picture of Linus getting his Holy Penguin Pee from Tux.

Things have been going very well so far. Registration was a breeze (compared to last year). By having all the bags packed with the correct tshirt size and labeled with the person’s name, we could process each registration in less than a minute. We had some of the speakers giving out bags, which was nice.

The speakers dinner on Tuesday and was very successful. It was a very relaxed atmosphere, and I got to talk to many interesting people. Some of the other organisers managed to convinced Linus to make an appearance at the welcome session. You can see the results here.

Tutorials on Wednesday went quite well. Went to a bit of malcolm‘s talk in the morning, and to Rusty’s talk in the arvo. They were followed by the “Proffesional networking session” which also ran very well. Everyone who attended was very impressed with how things were going. Tony brought some very nice Little Creatures beers.

Thursday saw the start of the talks. Also, the fonts announcement happened at LWE, so I was finally able to talk about it 🙂. Jim has done a wonderful job following through with this. I hope to get a copy of the Vera fonts to display my slides with.

Has a nice lunch with malcolm, alan and telsa and managed to miss the first lot of talks afterwards.

After the talks, we had a Q&A session. On the panel we had Linus, Tridge and Bdale. Part way through, Rusty was added as well because he was answering so many questions. Afterwards, someone said something like “you know you are at a good conference when you have 3 people on the panel and none of them are Alan”.

After that, the Linux Australia AGM was run. As part of the conference registration, delegates automatically got a membership with LA. This has very quickly brought the total number of members up from 5 to about 405. There were nominations and elections for seats on its board. It wasn’t as well handled as I would have liked. Since the nominations happened right before the voting there were many candidates I didn’t really know, which made it hard to make an informed choice. Good to see some new faces on the board though. Will be interesting to see how things shape up.