Month: May 2008

As Guadec approaches, I find myself preparing space in my drawers for whatever awesome new T-Shirts my inner student and I can pick up. I’m sure everyone appreciates these – I know I do, I wear them to work and the gym all the time, sometimes even going out (no one knows what ‘GNOME’ is, people occasionally mistake it for some trendy new clothing brand).

This all leaves me wondering though, shirts are definitely fully exploited… But what about… Trousers? I’m terrible at buying clothes, every time I go out to buy something, I always end up coming back with T-shirts, and possibly some weird gadgety thing or a new pair of shoes or something along those lines… But for some reason, rarely trousers. Just think how awesome GNOME/guadec trousers would be! This seems to be a missed opportunity, is it just me?

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Meant to stick it online a little while ago. The other week, I wrote a small tool to help with quickly determining screen measurements (in pixels). Handy if you’re writing graphical apps and you want to see if your allocations are working correctly, and that sort of thing. I present; Measure Tool 1.0:

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I decided to buy an ebook reader recently as there’s a lot of manga I want to catch up on and after borrowing mallum‘s Sony Librie for a while, I’ve found that it’s a great format for reading comics. Brilliant to de-stress while things are compiling. Anyway, Linux tools for such devices seem to be woefully lacking, so I figured it couldn’t be that hard to write my own (for my own particular needs) – and thanks to FOSS, it really wasn’t 🙂

Thanks to The GIMP’s scripting engine, I have a script that can transform images into the required format; thanks to bash, I have a shell script that can get all the images to the script; and thanks to cairo, it was incredibly easy to write an app that turns a load of PNGs into a PDF. Source for all can be found here – handy if you have a Sony Reader/Librie or an Irex Iliad or something along those lines. Probably less useful for Kindle users..?

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It’s now ok to read the SWF spec and create an independent SWF decoder? I don’t know if there are any catches here, but taking this at face value, that’s great, right?

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