Done!

[pne]

Yay! I just finished the first draft of my YAPC presentation which I'm scheduled to give on Thursday, the 24th of July, at 15:10 in the Fotango room.

I'm pretty impressed at myself, since I tend to procrastinate things. But I just sat down and wrote the thing in one sitting. (It probably helped that I had already ordered my thoughts by preparing the version for the proceedings.)

Anyway, if anyone is interested in taking a sneak preview at my presentation, they can go and have a look at the current draft. Comments and suggestions are welcome, especially typo corrections or bad links. Enjoy!

Comments

[pne.livejournal.com]

Thanks for your comments; I appreciate them, especially since this is the first time I'm doing this sort of thing. I'll think about them and see what I can do.

A couple of responses already.

slide 4: You're introducing the term 'RFC-1086-type bridge' here, but not explaining what it is.

Well, it's the last thing on the slide, and the next slide immediately talks about RFC 1086. Is this not good?

Slide 6a: Is it important what port is used here, or can this information be ommited for greater clarity?

The port itself is not that important... I was trying to say that both incoming connections must use the same port, but I'm not sure whether even that needs to be stated. I'll think about this a bit more.

Slide 6b: I don't like HTML as a presentation medium, or at least not the way you're doing it.

It seemed the best thing I could do. I don't have a laptop myself, so I'll have to borrow someone else's. I figured that HTML would work on pretty much everything, regardless of the operating system or installed programs. (Plus I don't have any experience with presentation software such as PowerPoint.)

Too much scrolling about the page, and the diagrams are never going to fit.

I can see the scrolling bit and was thinking about the diagrams. It depends in part on whether the browser has a full-screen mode; when I tested it in Opera and MSIE 5.5, most slides fit one one page. But if there's lots of UI on-screen and/or the browser isn't maximised, then yes, there will be scrolling in some places.

I'll have to go over the slides and see which ones are clearly too long.

Remember, your fonts are going to have to be very large to be readable at the back (and hence not all your stuff will fit on the screen for quite a lot of slides.

I tried to suggest this with my style sheet. Do you think the fonts, as you saw them, are big enough? Or should I make them still larger? (In that case, I'll need to look at the slides again with the larger font to see the effect.)

Slide 11a: You don't mention what version of Perl you're running here. This is quite important when it comes to threads

Good point; thanks.

Thanks also for the suggestion on problem-solution order (which also applies to slide 12).

Slide 15: You don't need the # by the } in the while loop for this example as it's obvious what's going on and this just makes it more confusing.

Page 17: The [ ] in the print statement are confusing and probably come from your original code, but isn't something the conference attendees need to see

Yes; in both cases this came straight from the code. I'll simplify it a bit more to remove irrelevant things.

Page 18: What, a conclusion? No running demo? No screenshot of the example output? I need to get a feel on what's going on here.

This is a difficult one. I'm not sure what to provide.

A demo would be a bit difficult since I'd either need to get the application running on the presentation machine (or one I can access e.g. via ssh), which means installing BEA TUXEDO and our company code and stuff, or writing an app simulator.

And I'm not sure whether the output will exemplify well what I've talked about (queues, semaphores, shared variables); there'll be lots of stuff about decoded EMI packets and other things which are irrelevant in this context.

I think I wanted to show the innards more than the output, but that's not something you can visualise graphically very well.

Again, thank you for your comments and suggestions.