Portrait of Edd Dumbill, taken by Giles Turnbull

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What I make

expectnation
a conference management web application


XTech Conference
a European web technology conference

And now, in Turkish

The Turkish .NET site csharpnedir.com interviewed me about Mono and XML. Very nice people.

XSL-FO and SVG

I've started work this week on a couple of projects with XSL-FO and SVG. As a consumer of the tools and specifications, rather than a developer of them, this seems to be just about the right time in the adoption lifecycle to start using these technologies.

I've been using Inkscape 0.40 again to create SVG diagrams to include in XSL-FO documents, but I'm having a little trouble when it comes to aligning images. I'll check to see if the recently released version 0.41 helps, but I've noticed that although everything looks nice in Inkscape, the SVG is often translated via transformations outside of the page. I've seen the effects of this both in the RenderX XEP formatter, and also when Nautilus comes to draw the thumbnail of the SVG. For now, I've been judiciously applying vi to the SVG to get it right.

The other thing I've been having some trouble with is importing EPS diagrams into SVG. Inkscape doesn't currently offer an import. Andrew Fitzsimon pointed me to the Scribus DTP program as a possible import route, but the results weren't very satisfactory. In the end I found that pstoedit has an SVG filter available, which yielded mostly satisfactory results.

Awaiting me next week is the pleasure of ensuring that CMYK colors are preserved into the final PDF documents. Happily I tread paths that the estimable Eliot Kimber has trod afore me.

Evolution IMAP improvements

The new IMAP4 backend in the latest betas of Evolution 2.2 is a huge improvement. I use a couple of Courier installations. The new IMAP backend not only makes the cranky one work, but speeds up startup times against both of the IMAP servers. Nice work.

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