Day 1, Miniconfs


Prog Lang Mini conf

Haskell Talk
Basics initially
  - the strong typing and checking is done at compile time
  - compiler debugs your thinking as bugs often throw compile errors. A Type
    errors is a flaw in design

Concurrency is hard
  - haskell has no mutable state so no race conditions
  - granularity choices for IO cause the compiler to choose when to slow down
    execution in the real world
  - small programs

Monads
   put things in a box to get things out of or put things into


Distro Mini conf

Bdale LSB State

- Compliance with LSB means a Linux system can be recognised as "Linux" to ISV's
  etc
- API that can be coded to
  - Shared library stabilisation is important
  - Tryuing to minimise unhelpful variations between distributions
- LSB is not predictive, it trails implementation of new stuff
- LSB expands to cover newer stuff
- Just because vendors do not commit to LSB being the standard does not stop
  it being useful
- Industry wish management comes in, what perceptions does industry have
  compared with reality and good use
- LSB release cycles will be slowed down to match the enterprise release
  cycles such as RHEL, Ubuntu LTS, etc
- Moblin is being used as the LSB reference distribution, anything moblin
  compliant should be LSB compiant
- They are trying to ensure they can help developers understand how to write
  LSB compliant applications

LSB stuff at http://ldn.linuxfoundation.org/lsb

many tools there to validate LSB compliance against


Womens miniconf

Elziabeth Garbee, Through the looking glass, a teenagers perspective on open
source

Of note, I wonder if Elizabeth participated in the draw batgirl meme on
myspace about 4 years ago, she had some batman and batgirl artwork

Open source is more than software it is a community.
Check the slides, she had a good list of misconceptions people her age have of
open source/free software

She had a horror story about a rule in her school that said any unix based
machine bought into the school could be grounds for immediate explusion, this
was before her lca2005 talk. This was put in place as a knee jerk reaction to
someone in previous years exploiting somehting on the school network with a
Linux system. Bdale got on the case and the rule was changed in a fortnight to
be less silly


Graphics mini conf
Andy Fitzsimon, SVG means the death of Flash...

A grease monkey plugin (Gordon?) can decompose any flash into SVG (video,
vectors, animation, etc)

There are tools available to clean up the genewrated SVG so it is not quite so
messy and still works.

- Andy pointed out how his desktop looked almost identical to MacOSX, not
  because he likes MacOS so much but so he has a similar interface on both and
  as you can not change MacOS to suit yourself exactly he keeps consistency
  with the two, another advantage of open source systems
  - They can be configured to do anything really

- Tools he showed off in inkscape are
  - Multiple selection edits
  - Clone tool in inkscape apply operations to all cloned objects
  - Spraypaint tool can clone spray painted objects

- With SVG support in browsers now anything you can possibly create in
  inskcape can be rendered in browsers (that Gordon thing)

- When they began using swfdec for playing flash the fact that it uses Cairo
  meant anything it plays could generate SVG


Elizabeth Garbee
Open source graphics tools at uni, using foss graphics to pay for a uni
education

- This talk largely focussed on FOSS and how undersatanding and being involved
  with it can benefit students, not so much directly pointing out how graphics
  tools can be used to help pay for things

- US uni (college) fees are insane, 22% of unit income comes from student
  fees. At a less well known college a 4 year degree may cost USD $115,000
  (local state uni), bigger/private colleges can cost much more
- Involvement in FOSS conferences and projects is a huge positive both in
  applications and recognition. Increases your value, in more than just
  computer fields.
- Also she mentions how open source skills and involvement can help a lot in
  later life
- She does mention she used FOSS graphics apps exclusively in preparing her
  college application portfolios (visual arts applications)


Carl Worth, Cairo stuff

Cairo was (and is) designed to be a library that exposes postscript style api
to graphics apps raw on the X Server. Originally it was a small idea Keith
Packard planted/had that Carl latched onto and has since grown.

Cairo is used by GTK, Gnome, Firefox, Inkscape, Scribus, Evince

Cairo does not try to abstracet absolutely everything, simply provides a nice
API for rendering stuff, it is in a stack (see slides) that you can access any
part of, Cairo, or higher or lower in the stack

Different sources combined with different masks can all be rendered by the end
drawing operation

PDF output has imporved out of site since the last release. Used to be that it
would render one last image into a PDF, now is actually outputs vector stuff
into PDF properly from the scalar data inside Cairo

Analysis of commands, through playing the operatons to generate something
through different back ends attempting to be saved to/used allows writing
supported stuff natively in output formats or including alternate objects when
not possible.

The recorded set of operations can be saved as an output format now

Now the output tends to avoid repeating images in output as it did in the last
release

It has been 16 months since the last release, 1.10 (new release) will have the
pdf improvements, analysis steps for mutliple outputs and other new
features. coming soon.


Programming languages mini conf again

Paul Fenwick, facebook applications in Perl.

Apps in any language can be made to work for facebook. The place to look is
the developers wiki at facebook.com

Canvas stuff has to be set if doing antyhing that displays html or status bar
changes
(canvas method should always be iframe Paul said)

Connect URL on your domain is the place that your app can be accessed/fetched
from

xfbml is simply a superset of xhtml on facebook. Paul's blog has some examples
of facebook code

Perl has a www::facebook::API module


Graphics mini conf again

Scribus talk

Using inkscape as a presentation tool for his talk, zomming in on a scalable
graphic of each item to talk about, interesting use

Coming up with lots of ideas but no t finishing them is common in the open
source world. This talk is about finishing a bunch of his ideas. one thing he
worked on is the opencolor.org project, trying to replace pantone colours


Andy Fitzsimon, tricks to jazz up old stuff in inkscape
- Reflection tool
- make things shiny
- Make things 3d