I love oggcamp for the sheer randomness of what I learn there. I’ve variously seen talks on home automation, mapping, operating systems, politics … the list is pretty long. This year, it’s in Surrey, on the same weekend as the final deadlines for my book so I figured I’d have to give it a miss. But when I got an invite to speak on the scheduled track, I realised this was the omen I needed, and accepted at once!
I’ll be giving a talk entitled “Open Source Your Career” – a talk which brings up an aspect of open source that we often don’t discuss; the personal rewards that an individual can gain from being involved in open source. If you thought it was all about altruism, think again. I’ll be bringing anecdotes, from my own career and others’, about how the best way to fast-track your professional growth. See you in Surrey :)
The worst thing you can do is find some random, underqualified person who represents the demographic you want to include, and put them on the stage. Although gender is often the issue we hear most about, the same applies to anyone who isn’t a young, white male; it’s just that gender is easier to see and talk about than either age, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or anything else, and also since I’m a young, white female, it’s the only aspect I can comment on.Women are in such a minority that they are, almost by definition, representative (see http://xkcd.com/385). Anyone who sees your randomly-selected woman speak will simply go away thinking that women aren’t really good at speaking. Continue reading
This is a regional PHP conference based in Manchester, UK, and I’ve been involved with it since it began (I’m surprised to find this is our fourth edition, it still feels like a shiny new adventure!). This year the dates are 8th and 9th of October and with an added tutorial day on the Friday, it is bigger (and of course better) than ever. In case you missed the announcements, here are the main things you need to know:
My first observation was that although I thought this would be a pretty serious book, I was laughing! Not just smiling, but actually giggling on a fairly small plane of people doing the short hop over to Amsterdam. I saw a few people trying to read the cover to figure out what this great comedic tome would be :)
Getting the thing installed was a bit of a puzzle as it has many dependencies (and that’s just the compiler) but I now have it working like a dream on both my laptop and my netbook. I discovered that it didn’t work with my presenter mouse but with a bit of help from a friend, I have a patch for that and now when I’m presenting I see something like this:
You can set which screen show this, and which shows just the main slide, and you can also set what duration the countdown timer should start from. One really key feature is that the timer doesn’t start counting until you advance from the first slide … unlike in open office where I usually put up the title slide during the break before my talk, then have to stop and start the presentation to reset the clock so I’ve got some vague idea of my running time!
So in true open source form, there’s a tool out there already (thanks Jakob, and thanks for responding to my emails!), and I was able to adapt it to my use case, or rather Kevin was able to! I would love to have the presenter console packaged so I could recommend it for more users, but for now I have a great open source solution enabling me to do what I’m good at – delivering content.
First of all, LaTeX templates are fussy things, start with someone else’s outline (for example the one Dave posted, which I use), or one you made earlier. There is some preamble and then the main contents of the presentation go between the \begin{document} and \end{document} bits.
Getting started was a struggle, I’ve never really used anything like it before and if there’s one thing LaTeX doesn’t do well, it’s error messages! The blog post I linked above has a sample presentation in it and I used that as my starting point. The source code goes in a file with a “.tex” suffix, e.g. presentation.tex. I then installed the texlive-latex-extra, latexmk, vim-latexsuite, latex-fonts-recommended and texlive-fonts-extra packages from aptitude, and generated a PDF by running:
latexmk -f -pdfps presentation.tex