In my previous post, I talked about the majuscles. Now it’s time to implement the minuscles, or the lower case characters.
This time, I omitted the sketch and try to implement it directly in FontForge. I think, it worked pretty well, but judge it yourself:
It’s a first draft. Of course, I have to adjust a lot of things. The font is far from finished or being perfect. 🙂
After this, I have to find a good name. Any suggestions? Robert thinks, Toms Mono is a funny name and I should keep it. 😉
Day 3 started off relatively early in comparison to day 2, why? Because I was continuing my ChatWeek with a fairly important chat with a fairly influential person. The person in question was non other than Jeff Jaffe, Novell’s CTO. Fellow Community member Pascal Blesser and myself were invited to have a relaxed discussion with Jeff about openSUSE and Novell and bring up any issues/comments/etc that we may know of. We spoke with Andreas Jaeger and Michael Loeffler yesterday about the impending meeting, and discussed at some length some of the items not just because we hoped to bring them up with Jeff, but because we felt they warranted discussion regardless of who it was in front of.
The meeting with Jeff went well, and we appreciate the opportunity immensely to be able to speak fairly frankly to Jeff (no, neither of us swore or threw any furniture in the style of a Rock Star). We didn’t manage to go through all the points we would have liked, but we certainly got through the big burning issues that we had. After almost 90 minutes Jeff had to leave and do the rounds to see how HackWeek was progressing from the “shop floor”. This meeting wasn’t a marketing blah blah meeting but a definite participation on all sides; there were times when disagreement happened but as the atmosphere was relaxed it was pretty easy to move on.
Afterwards I tried (relatively unsuccessfully) to get on with my project and edit the footage from the previous day. Why oh why is video editing not simple? Either applications are just way way way too difficult or just unbelievably unstable to the point of uselessness. Hopefully tomorrow will be more successful when I pressgang Thomas Schmidt into helping me 🙂
For ALL participants of HackWeek: SudoWrestling, a great Linux focused podcast and blogcast (sometimes they can’t be bothered to talk, strange considering they’re women 😉 ) would really like to hear from you about your projects. Now is the time to blow your own trumpet and chat to these two lovely Linux loving lunatics.
So the fun and sun in Nurenberg continues 😀
Again day 2 started off very much as day 1 – lots of discussions. This is not a bad thing, and maybe Novell would consider sponsoring a ChatWeek (it could be condensed into 2 or 3 days), it is a fact that communication is the one major stumbling block that any company/community suffers from and Novell and openSUSE are no exception to this.
We started with general discussions and continuing some of the discussions we had over dinner last night. After lunch we then continued our discussions on openSUSE and what/how things could be improved – highly productive and very inspiring to get internal and external community members to speak honestly and bluntly about their thoughts and ideas.
Note to the community (yes, all of you!): If you have thoughts on what or how to help imporve anything within the openSUSE universe speak up!! If you’re not sure who or how to do so, the key contact details (in no particular order) are Zonker, opensuse-project mailing list, #opensuse-project irc channel and of course the openSUSE Board. One of the advantages of openSUSE is that you can pick things up and run with them, if you need any help just ask and people will rally around (sometimes it takes a bit of time but it does happen, honest).
After all the discussions I had just enough time to grab a drink before the first openSUSE Marketing Team irc meeting took place. This was shorter than I would personally have like, but that was down to one very important reason – the HackWeek BBQ!
The BBQ was and is a great opportunity for people just to chat on all levels, and general have fun with some fine food and some fine Bavarian Beer – Pascal will certainly disagree with me on the last point, but then again he is kind of correct; being Belgian he is used to a much wider variety and quality of beers, just go to FOSDEM to find out 😉 You can see a montage of the video that I took over here – yes I know it’s evil flash!
The party atmosphere went on long into the night and everyone managed to enjoy themselves. Thank you SUSE for the fine food and beer, and thank you Pascal for bringing some prized Belgian beers for comparison with the Bavarian ones.
On tuesday a couple of developers met to discuss cross-platform building in the openSUSE build service.
In the evening we had a BBQ and there Jan-Simon and Stephan discussed the openSUSE weekly news that Jan-Simon then wrote on wednesday – this time from Nürnberg.
Pascal left on wednesday and told me that he really enjoyed “Chatweek”. He – and others including myself – used the chance to meet each other for many discussions.
I took part on wednesday afternoon in a rather long discussion on the different security defaults of server and desktop products, e.g. how to setup a laptop so that it allows a logged in user to install patches and a server that only the admin can install patches – and do this right out of the box.
Yesterday afternoon, Hackweek III was running on full throttle, suddenly Jeff Jaffe, the CTO of Novell, stepped into our office. No meeting appointment, no big words, just a “What are you guys working on in Hackweek?”. Well, everybody who ever was working as an employee might understand that having the boss of the boss of the boss stepping into the office spontanously can be a bit exiting, but that is just the first two seconds. I think it is cool if executives do that.
In the company I worked before S.u.S.E. the owner always visited us on friday afternoons and sat on the developers desk. He was somehow geeky and was simply interested in tech talk. That made me nervous in the beginning, but later it was fun and informing. It was a great opportunity to present good ideas or concerns and on the other hand he gave a lot of first hand information what customers say, how the fairs went etc. In this kind of situation we convinced him finally that our under-cover Linux port of our solaris based product was way better for all customers than the Windows version most customers (and thus the executives) asked for.
I was hacking on my KDE application Kraft when Jeff asked, which is certainly not for the enterprise market. But given that applications are the key to pull people to linux we agreed that it is a cool Hackweek project 😉 I forgot to ask him what he is hacking on 🙂
You see it every day, you normally don’t think about it, but it is nevertheless important: Fonts.
Obviously we need fonts to communicate with each other, especially in digital media. A whole industry create thousends of fonts for different task: for books, magazines, headlines, comics, funerals, weddings, and much, much more.
However, these fonts are not free and as such cost money. Unfortunately, in the past there was a lack of good looking, professional fonts. The situation nowadays are getter better and better as we have very promising open source fonts: DejaVu, Gentium, LinuxLibertine, to name a few. Without these, our world of characters would be very small and we would have a limited choice only. It’s a pity that all these beautiful fonts don’t have a condensed monospace version. This would be very useful, for example you can have more characters on a line and you don’t have to break them into pieces.
As I haven’t found a suitable font for me, I thought why not create one? Of course, I could have used one of the above, apply some transformations and be happy (or not). But this is not really creative, so I thought why not design something totally new? So I have chosen this project for Hackweek.
Let’s make it clear: It is really hard and nobody really know the time and sweat that goes into a font. To create a really good looking font it is really a challenge—and obviously not possible during Hackweek. But I think, to create something new and gain some experience, this can be a lot of fun. 🙂
So here is the rough procedure that I used for this font:
As I learn more and more of FontForge, these tasks become (hopefully) easier. The font is similar to Dejavu Mono, but not identical. The result of all these steps is shown in this graphic (be warned, obscure text ahead):
As you can see I have drawn the majuscules only. I will try to implement the minuscles and other characters too, at the latest of the next Hackweek. 😉
Funny, but jimmac is working also on a font too. Good luck to you! 🙂
I will publish the font when I think it is in a somehow useful state. It will be released under an open source license (probably Open Font License or GPL, I don’t know yet).
Feedback welcome! 🙂
This might not be that useful, but it’s fun.
If you look at the openSUSE installer during the time it’s busy, you can see at least 4 types of progress bars shown:
My goal for this hackweek is to unify them as much as possible. So, now I have something to show. The prototype works on openSUSE 11.0 Alpha2 and unifies steps 1-3. Here is a screenshot:
After my disasterous attempt to travel out to Nurenberg on Sunday – I managed to get my passport stolen at security of all places 🙁 (I thought I had lost it, but nothing found yet). I managed to travel out first thing on Monday.
The timing was perfect, I managed to get to the SUSE offices in NUE just in time to drop my bags and meet up with Andreas for a little tour/familiarisation of the site. This was great because we (openSUSE invited about 10 community members to NUE) got to see a load of the great folks that work on the project and see how they do it (including the ever elusive Beineri:
We then had a pleasant brunch, and afterwards sat down to start hacking on our respective projects.
So what is one doing for HackWeek? Well it isnt exactly hacking (well not initially although I may have to so I can get the end product out); I’m hoping to do some videos of HackWeek, both documentary style(ish) and some interviews. Why do I say “hoping”? Well I’ve hardly filmed anything 🙁 I have been way too busy discussing and speaking about openSUSE with people.
Day 1 was very much a ChatWeek moment rather than HackWeek 🙂 The chatting took place all around the offices, and even in Meeting Rooms where we discussed many aspects of the project. I continued chatting with fellow openSUSE peeps over dinner and well into the night:
It isn’t all chatting though, some people did manage to get some coding done albeit in between chats 🙂 By the way Andreas isn’t laughing at the code quality and Benji isn’t playing an advanced level of nethack – honest!
I’m certainly hoping to be able to get some video recorded on Day 2, but these people at SUSE are just so damned social that it’s really hard!! 😀
This is about what I did yesterday in the first day of hackweek:
It is a hello world program. No, the interesting thing about that is not that I am finally able to write a hello-world (which I copied from the internet anyway) but the system on which it is running is unusual for me. It is another system than Linux, it is Windows.
Still somehow boring to let run a hello world on Windows? Yes, but I did not build it on Windows. I build it on Linux on a free software stack. I yesterday set up a mingw compiler ready for cross compiling Windows binaries on Linux. Maybe this can be the first little step towards a Windows build target in the Buildservice.
What do you think?
Yesterday hackweek in Nürnberg was for me not hacking but managing hackweek. Let’s see whether I find time today to really hack on glibc as planned.
As I organised travels for some folks to come to Nürnberg, I welcomed everybody and showed them around in the office. In the afternoon I talked with many folks about what they are doing at hackweek and like to point out some interesting projects:
We also discussed heavily the openSUSE project and what should be improved. Pascal, Andrew, Marko and myself talked also about the board elections, it’s good that some members of election committee and of the board had the chance to meet face to face.
It was great to see so many openSUSE community members for the first time – and to see many people hacking happily on their projects.
Adrian Schröter (12)
Agustin Chavarria (6)
Alessandro de Oliveira Faria (13)
Alex Barrios (12)
Alexander Naumov (10)
Alexander Orlovskyy (3)
Alin M Elena (5)
Andrea Florio (27)
Andreas Jaeger (70)
Andreas Stieger (12)
Andrew Wafaa (31)
Arvin Schnell (9)
Atri Bhattacharya (3)
Bernhard Wiedemann (31)
Bonnie Kurniawan (1)
Bruno Friedmann (98)
Calumma Brevicorne (29)
Carl Fletcher (1)
Christopher Hobbs (17)
Ciaran Farrell (3)
Stephan Kulow (17)
craig gardner (2)
Stephan Barth (2)
Thomas Schmidt (2)
Dinar Valeev (1)
Dirk Mueller (2)
Dmitry Serpokryl (7)
Efstathios Iosifidis (21)
Fabio Mucciante (5)
Federico Lucifredi (9)
Greg Freemyer (1)
Holger Sickenberg (2)
Hubert Mantel (1)
Ilya Chernykh (5)
Ismail Donmez (1)
J. Daniel Schmidt (2)
James Tremblay (7)
Jan Blunck (4)
Jan Loeser (3)
Jan Madsen (1)
Jan-Christoph Bornschlegel (3)
Jan-Simon Möller (20)
Javier Llorente (12)
Jigish Gohil (85)
Jiri Srain (1)
Jiří Suchomel (3)
Johan Kotze (5)
José Oramas M. (6)
Josef Reidinger (16)
Juergen Weigert (1)
Julio Vannini (9)
Dinar Valeev (5)
Kevin "Yeaux" Dupuy (11)
Klaas Freitag (55)
Lars Vogdt (11)
Ludwig Nussel (13)
M. Edwin Zakaria (4)
Marcus Hüwe (39)
Marcus Meissner (2)
Marcus Moeller (3)
Marcus Schaefer (4)
Martin Lasarsch (8)
Martin Mohring (11)
Masim "Vavai" Sugianto (20)
Michael Andres (1)
Michael Löffler (7)
Michal Marek (7)
Michal Vyskocil (12)
Miguel Angel Barajas Hernandez (2)
P Linnell (2)
Nelson Marques (55)
Nenad Latinović (1)
Nikanth Karthikesan (2)
Przemyslaw Bojczuk (1)
Peter Pöml (4)
Petr Gajdos (2)
Petr Mladek (60)
Petr Uzel (5)
Ray Wang (1)
Raymond Wooninck (1)
Ricardo Chung (7)
Ricardo Varas Santana (7)
Richard Bos (11)
Robert Schweikert (16)
Rossana Motta (1)
Rupert Horstkötter (10)
Sascha Manns (66)
saydul akram (3)
Sebastian Siebert (6)
Shawn Dunn (2)
Stanislav Visnovsky (7)
Stefan Haas (1)
Stefan Hundhammer (5)
Stefan Schubert (7)
Steffen Winterfeldt (8)
Suresh Jayaraman (3)
Susanne Oberhauser (3)
Thomas Göttlicher (6)
Thomas Schraitle (26)
Togan Muftuoglu (3)
Tuukka Pasanen (36)
Will Stephenson (22)
YaST Team (90)