I havn't been blogging for a while. With all the free time I have gained by not blogging I have completed librsvg filter support.

With every filter supported one can do some really cool stuff. For example by using diffuse lighting and about 5 other filters in sequence one can turn a boring flat SVG flag that won't be used by gnome for political reasons into a wavy beautifully 3d shaded SVG flag that won't be used by gnome for political reasons. The drawbacks is not all political however, there is also the obvious fact that running a sequence of five per-pixel nested loop based functions in series on a 2000x1000 bitmap isn't exactly instantaneous. Mind you, having a flag adorned desktop is always rather pretty and very cosmopolitan.

Of cause, filters were by no means the last frontier as far as librsvg development is concerned, primarily we need to fix text support and get group based symbols. However with cinamod now working on text support and myself working on making symbol support better, becoming competitive with batik as far as spec support is not all that far away.

I am now back in Sydney and once again attending the fine University of New South Wales. Being in Sydney allowed me to attend Sydney Linux Users Group an organisation that I ironically found out off Uraeus, a Norwegian. There I met jdub who I congratulated on his irreverent release names, I payed my subscription fees there and I hope to attend it regularly. Unfortunately most of the events I see there seem to have something to do with debian, which I by no means oppose but I unfortunately it is not to my taste.