This is a little late, but I wanted to write about SCALE, one of my favorite Linux conferences. It is laid back, but well organized. It is small, but has interesting speakers. It is fun; simply it's fun.

Inkscape sticker with butterflies

We usually have an Inkscape booth at SCALE, and this year we did it again. It's always interesting to meet people and either introduce them to Inkscape, or hear how they're using it. This year we decided to hold a sticker contest so that we'd have a give away at the booth. There were lots of great designs, but because of a mix up with the printer we didn't actually get them at the booth. Kinda sad.

Another thing that was different this year is that SCALE featured a "Try-it" lab. This was a lab set up with 20 thin clients to allow conference goers to actually play with some of the things being talked about at the conference. We were able to get four slots, and Josh taught four classes that I heard nothing but good things about (I had to man the booth). There was video taken of at least one of them, so I hope that gets online (and is useful) here soon.

This year I also gave a talk called The Ubuntu Desktop: Bling for Usability which focused on the fact that much of what is called bling or eye candy today does have a purpose, and will probably be the expected feature of tomorrow. After last year where my talk went embarrassingly long I managed to make this one too short. Which was okay, but I think everyone in the audience checked their watch as soon as my questions slide appeared on the screen.

One of the most interesting things I learned this year was from the folks at Open Streetmap. Turns out that all of the tiles in their database are made using Inkscape. Apparently they have a project called Tiles@Home which does distributed rendering using Inkscape instances all over the world. They joked, but I think it's likely they're correct, that they're the largest group of Inkscape users anywhere.

SCALE is a fun conference where it's good to meet up with old friends and make new ones. Even though I'm moving, I hope to attend next year as well.


posted Mar 6, 2008 | permanent link