Some Impressions on LGM

Ok, first let me same I'm totally awful with writing kind of what-did-I-do blogpost and at the same time both Nicu and Pierros are making a really good posts about what we do here (with some of the best photos Nicu and Pierros took included)…

My first first impression of Belgium was not that great — I'm pretty used from Czech Republic to get easy everwhere, there're "online" infotables about trains departures/arrivals on train stations, the subway in Prague is really easy to follow (I'd say it follows the KISS principle, like gnome does), and to add to that everything here in Belgium is in French (which I know nothing about) so I was a bit at loss when trying to travel from Charleroi to Brussels and then to our hotel. But at last I was successful.

It really is a bless to have Pierros with us — if it were not for him, I would be constantly lost in the city (somehow my sense of direction in big cities is terrible) ;-) Both Nicu and Pierros are really awesome companions and they're showing me lots of new stuff I have no idea about (like the Belgium beers). Btw. speaking about the beers, I'm totally "insesitive" in this area and most beers I've tried taste very similar to me :-D

But back to the conference itself. Yesterday's morning lectures were the more technical ones which is probably not a best way to start a graphics meeting, but they were pretty interesting. Lots of python, some C and even Scheme based scripting language (the Script-fu and Tiny-fu from gimp). The most interesting talk for me for that part of day was A first outline for a UI for a fully GEGLed GIMP. As I understand it it's a new type of workflow and format that is kind of chain based — you take the initial image and apply various edits, effects and other operations like the old way, but the difference is that it does not change the image itself. Those of you familiar with quantum physics or generally a [noncomutative] operator algebra over some space could see it as taking an image (member of the space in question) and applying various operators on it. And the point is, you apply it only on screen, in memory it's still being interpreted as a sequence of operators applied on the image. So you can insert another operators in the middle, delete some of them, without breaking the rest of the chain. Lots of possibilities. I really look forward the time when this will be included in gimp releases ;-)

The lunch was fairly good, and we've met some interesting people there. It's a really great oportunity to talk with various people during the lunch break. In the afternoon there were some interesting presentations like How to get contributors to your Free/Libre/Open Source project from Vietnam and Asia or How to Run an Art School on Free and Open Source Software. Btw. Hong Phuc Dang who was doing the presentation about Open Source in Vietnam is really enthuiastic about the FLOSS software as you can see in the video she put up (sadly it's in flash, but it should be acessible form lgm site some time in the future hopefully in more open format). And of course, we've had our presentation with Nicu, seems the audience liked it, but we're regretting that we forgot to say some of the things we wanted to say…

Today, I'm a little sad that we overslept and missed a good part of the Diffusion Curves in Inkscape vector drawings, there was an interesing presentation about LibreDWG and I'm looking forward some presentation later today about fonts and typography.