Older blog entries for donscarletti (starting at number 0)

This is my first entry so I should probably introduce myself.

My name is Caleb Moore. I live in Kingsford which is a suburb in Sydney, Australia. My time is spent as a student in the University of New South Wales, as a Free Software coder and also squandered away in many futile activities. I am, at the time of writing this: twenty years of age, one hundred kilogrammes in weight and a bit over one hundred and eighty centimetres in height. But such things seem of little import on the Internet.

Throughout my life I have held by my assumption that since I am not interested in my own life in the slightest that nobody else would be either. I now realise if one is browsing the web at four A.M. when one has little purpose, anything is worth reading. Due to this realisation I have joined up to advogato and have became certified a couple of times in order to spread my inane babblings to the world.

Being socially awkward but a skilled coder has lead me in the past to sometimes wish that society could be expressed algorithmically. Ironically, Advogato seems to be such a society but I can currently understand less of it than the real society I humiliated myself in during highschool. What I have gleaned is that I have a distance from a seed of 2 (Alan->Uraeus->Donscarletti) which gives me a capacity of 200. Although I currently do not understand what that means, I suspect that it means that I am not being ignored as thoroughly as I possibly should be.

Currently I am involved with the Gnome project, specifically librsvg. It is not my first project, nor even my first Free Software project (the honour for that goes to late, a little computer game which's sole redeeming feature is that it only took me a few hours to write). My participation in the Gnome project has been mainly centred around scalable vector graphics. My first experience with them was with the sodipodi-flags project, a project where the flags of the world are drawn in a scalable format and distributed so they can be used as a resource for any other project.

The ability to be used as a resource was what got me into librsvg. The sodipodi-flags project was part of gnome, but gnome however couldn't render them properly. This had to be fixed and since I was the one who wanted it fixed, I was the one who did so. I have since kept contributing to this project, however my contributions have become regrettably less frequent over the last few weeks.

I think I should give a bit of background information about librsvg. Librsvg is, unsurprisingly the library in gnome for rendering scalable vector graphics. It job is very simple in essence, to load up a file, render it as an SVG and dump it out as a GDK pixmap. Librsvg is also pretty much a condemned library, as its cairo based competitors grows its usefulness wanes. However it will still be used for many versions of gnome to come despite this both because of the incompleteness of the alternatives and the difficulty of converting the applications that have it as a dependency.

Librsvg is not by any means a complete implementation of the svg format, and that's where I come in. I try and make it more true to the original specifications. Interestingly the project was started by Raph Levien so if I wanted to make some comments about what I think about the structure of the librsvg codebase this would be an inappropriate medium to do so in.... Lets just say that attack resistant trust metrics was not the only thing that he has coded that I have found hard to initially understand ;-)

Apart from that I usually write games, quite a few games actually. However I seem to often loose interest fairly soon and they are rarely finished. The work put into them is often lost. However I have resolved that the next time I start a promising game that I will dump it into sourceforge and recruit a few interested people so it will not fall into the same dismal end that the earlier ones did.

Anyway. I think that this serves as an introduction and I will leave it as this.

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