Jouke

Een weekje weg…

Ja, dat zou leuk zijn. Een weekje weg. Als het vakantie was wel ja…
Maar nee, er moet brood op de plank komen, en dus ben ik deze week voor m’n werk in Amsterdam. Echt veel zin om 3 nachten in een hotel en dus een vreemd bed te slapen heb ik niet, maar goed. Het is zo op het eerste oog wel een leuk hotel, en bovendien, ik zit er alleen ‘s avonds. Overdag is het druk druk druk.

Het hotel is nogal futuristisch. Als je binnen komt (via rood-glazen deuren) staat er een dame die je instrueert hoe de check-in procedure werkt. Je achternaam op een terminal intypen, en vervolgens doorloop je een wizard die je allerlei vragen stelt. Aan het einde van de rit de pinpas in de lezer, betalen, zelf een keycard pakken en voor de kaart-schrijver houden, en hop! Je hebt toegang. Op een bonnetje verschijnt je kamernummer.

Bij het open doen van de kamerdeur staat de volgende verrassing te wachten: links een toilet, rechts een douche, en daarachter een bed. Let wel: alles in één ruimte. Geen muren, geen deuren. Nee, in plaats daarvan ronde matglazen schuifdeuren, met gekleurde lampen er boven. Naast het bed zit een afstandsbediening aan de muur, waarmee je alles kan regelen: gordijnen en lamellen (open/dicht), licht (aan/uit maar ook welke kleur of kleuren), tv, wekker, noem maar op.

Wel geschikt voor een gadget-freak…

Welk hotel het is? CitizenM!

War is over :-)

Maybe “War is over” is a bit over-exaggerated, but at least the Yet Another Perl Conference Europe 2.0.01 is over. We’ve had three very exhausting, fun, interesting and stressful days, with many enthousiastic attendees and speakers very much worth listening to.

I had my own presentation yesterday about pVoice. Although there were not too much people in the audience (I learned later that the pubcrawl the night before had something to do with that ), everyone was obviously very interested in the subject, because they all stayed and asked questions even when my time was up and the break had already started. Heck, they all left when the break was over and the next talk was about to start!

Saturday ended with a big thank you to all people who had done so much, especially Ann Barcomb who kept everything together and nagged and pestered everyone to do the things they should do.
After that Greg “Should I start singing again” McCarroll auctioned everything that we got from our sponsors for the auction and more (like signed Buffy pictures, the right to decide the London.pm meetingdates and more). The total amount of money from the auction was no less than Fl 9033,=!!! Thank you everyone! The money will be spent partly on a Perl advocacy project in the Netherlands and partly on startup costs for the next YAPC::Europe.

After everything was cleaned up, most of the crew core along with one attendee (Andreas) and one wireless networking guy from the HAL organization (Sebastian) went to a restaurant for a final dinner. Again I got home late (0:00).

Today was nothing more than sleeping and recovering

Sleep? What is that?

I left the pubcrawl at 0:30 last night and thought I could grab a metro back to the Hogeschool, where I left my car. Boy was I wrong. Public transport stops at 0:25. So I had to take a cab to the Hogeschool and started driving my car at 1:00. Got home around 2:00 and fell asleep somewhat after 2:30….That blasted alarmclock had the nerve to go off at 6! So you might imagine I’m even more tired than I was yesterday.

I did however manage to be at the Hogeschool on time again, in fact I’m writing this now at the venue’s computerlab. In the room next to this Hugh Daniels gives his speech, filling the gap that Tim O’Reilly had to leave behind unfortunately. Kudo’s to Hugh!

When I came in I immediately went to the Iterative Software room where I will give my own talk about pVoice at 10:00. I was right to assume that it would take a while to set everything up. It took me 45 minutes. If I would have done that when I had to start the speech when the time was up . I’m getting a little nervous now. It’s probably the least technical speech that’s being given at the conference, because it’s mainly about the interface of pVoice. Everything under the hood is really simple. At least at the moment.

Yesterday I had quite a long talk with Kevin Lenzo about Festival and Festvox and it looks really promising how Festvox can build the voice I need from the pre-recorded voice I already have. The only issue that’s left is to build a general purpose voice rather than a limited domain voice. The latter can only be used for certain sets of words which have been predefined. A general purpose voice should be able to pronounce every word with the voice you built. I’m really looking forward to diving more into it.

After my talk with Kevin I went to Brian Ingersons Inline talk. That was really good fun. The first part was “serious” and when he came to the point of reversing the Inline stuff and creating a C interpreter which uses Perl inline which uses Inline::C it became hilarious.
After that I listened to some lightning talks, of which some were good, some were less good. I especially liked Dave Cross’ “Why Perl Advocacy is Bad”. Really, I LMAO .

After the regular schedule we were to go to have some dinner with the Perlmonks. It turned out that a lot of people thought everyone was just going to find a location to eat so many more non-Perlmonks joined. However we had a lot of fun and at 21:00 we joined the Pubcrawl which started very nearby the restaurant where we ate.

I’m going to walk around a bit and try to lose my feeling of nervosity…I don’t think I’ll manage

Day 2 has started

OK, I just updated the photo’s page again, adding photo’s taken by Frank Ederveen. Wow, what a difference in quality compared to my little cam. But hey, what the heck.

I know I’ve been uncareful logging into use Perl; knowing that my password hasn’t been encrypted. However, I only use this password on this site and I have nothing to hide here. Hell, anyone may know this password if they want.

We had to start a bit late because JohnPC was late and he was bringing a digital camera to record the keynote speech by Daniel Karrenberg. It will be published on a site somewhere later. This way anyone can hear what he had to say later on.

Boy, am I tired. I got to bed after 01:30 and got up at 6. And my children woke me up 4 times in between… Children are fun, but not when you’re trying to get a bit of sleep .

I’m going to talk to Kevin Lenzo later today. He’s going to help me to generate syntesized voices for pVoice. I’m really looking forward to it. I’ve looked into Festival and FestVox before, but I didn’t get any further than playing the example voices and doing the TTS (TextToSpeech) stuff. Kevin said something like “It would be fairly simple to implement”. I’ll see…

While I was writing the previous paragraph I was called away and had to do some organizational stuff. Luckily Beatnik and Toadi (from Perlmonks) wanted to keep an eye on my laptop, because things are not safe here. A lot of stuff gets stolen and we’re stressing everyone to watch out. But things took longer than I expected and the POE talk by Sky already started when I dropped in and I’m finishing this part during his talk

I’m not so sophisticated as you may think: I don’t have a wireless card in my laptop. So that means all of this is written offline

Tonight we’ll have the pubcrawl, so don’t expect an update from me tonight. I’ll try to keep things up to date during the day, but being part of the organization does not make that easy…

Day 1 of YAPC::Europe has ended

Wow, this has been some day. I just looked over the photo’s I took and put online and thought several times: hey..this wasn’t today…that was yesterday. But no, this day was feeling like two days. A lot has happened.

The overall idea I’m getting is that everything goes well. Unfortunately they’re very busy reconstructing the building we’re having the conference in. In $room[2] there has been some noise during the talks today, but from what I’ve heard, other rooms didn’t have any problems like that.

The morning started with registration, and a lot of people came in too late to get a glimpse of Kevin Lenzo’s hello-talk, where he talked some more about the cooperation between YAS, PerlMonks and Perl Mongers. He said that you probably won’t notice the merge, but there might come some improvements along the way.

At 9:30 the tuturialday started and I had to go to $room[2] where the GUI talks were being held. I was appointed as session chair to introduce speakers (which is hard since I didn’t know the guys until 5 minutes before they were expected to start ) and I had to keep an eye out for problems or other things that should be solved.

The Tk talk by Mark Overmeer was interesting, but I expected to hear more about Tk itself. His talk was more about integration of Tk with your existing environments, so it also included things like XS, Inline::C, pack/unpack and so on. I was mainly interested in the advanced features of Tk, which were unfortunately only covered in the very last part of the tutorial, where we were creating composite widgets.

After the lunchbreak -where I had a nice talk with some PerlMonks- we continued with a Gtk tutorial by Redvers Davies. It was a good tutorial, and in the second half of it he started to build an application along with the attendees of his talk to facilitate the action on Saturday. A very good idea (from Greg McCarroll in fact) that showed the things you come across when you’re writing your own Gtk programs.

Unfortunately this morning my camera “broke down”. At least, that was what I thought. In fact I was under the impression that my (only recently bought) camera was recharging itself every time I attached the AC adaptor. Which it doesn’t. It just contains an old-fashioned non-rechargable battery that was used up. So I rushed into the shop this afternoon and bought two new batteries. And I immediately started shooting more pictures.

At 18:30 the speakers and crew left for the Speakers Dinner. That was big fun and good food at a Libanese restaurant in Amsterdam. I’ve taken quite a lot of pictures there (I know, I annoyed many of you, and will continue to do so these days ), which you can find also on the photo’s page

If you know any of the names I didn’t fill in, please send me a mail or /msg me at PerlMonks, because I’d like to have the subscripts as complete as possible…

Well, it’s 01:07 now. I just prepared my welcome talk for tomorrow morning at 9, uploaded the photo’s, updated this journal. I think it’s about time I go to sleep. The alarmclock will go off at 06:00…AAAARRRGGHHH!!!

I’m prepared

Although still not completely sure how much of the conference I will be able to attend, I’m at least fully prepared for it.

Yesterday evening I reinstalled my daughters laptop which I will be using during the conference. I also finished the preparation of my pVoice talk which I will be giving on Saturday morning. The video I’m going to show is also ready now. I had been playing with me acting as a voice-over on the video, but I wasn’t happy with the result. The final piece of video has just the original audio, and I’m translating and explaining things live during the presentation.
I also checked my digital cam, which I will use extensively I hope .

Tonight we’ll have our last YAPC meeting. I think there is not much to discuss anymore. We’ll see…

Oh, yeah. Someone reminded me that I didn’t provide the URL of my homepage, while I referred to it in my latest journal, so here it is:

http://jouke.perlmonk.org

See? There it is now

Almost YAPC

It’s almost YAPC time now. Tomorrow evening we’ll have our last YAPC meeting, which will probably be a listing of “Oh, I forgot that..how are we going to tell people that?” or “Hey, I heard that speaker X is not coming….how do we fill that time?”. We can’t do much about it anymore.

Wednesday will be a busy day. Most of us are going to the HS Holland to do networking stuff, moving chairs, setting everything up, etc. From 16:00h people can pre-register. I will be there from around 14:00 I hope. I hope I can make it to the conference at all. Some nasty personal things have come up which could prevent me from going at all. I hope things will work out right.

I haven’t done ANY perl this weekend And I was really looking forward to having some time to hack my way to a new version of pVoice. Don’t know yet what pVoice is? Take a look at my homepage and you’ll know. Basically it’s a speechapplication for disabled children. I will probably mention it more in later journals.

Oh, yeah…I almost forgot. I got a moderately positive response from Manning about my proposal to write a book for them. The publisher is away for a few days, but he’ll get in touch with me after August 3. I hope that he’ll accept my idea…

a good day to start…

I want to become a writer. So I’d better start somewhere. This looks like a good time and place to start! use Perl; is providing this Journal, so I’m going to try to keep people up to date on a regular basis.

Today I sent an email to Manning asking them if they are interested in publishing the book I want to write. I guess everyone would like to have some way to be immortal. My idea of immortality is to write a book. To let other people know what I know. It’s a dream and I think I can let it become a reality. It’s however of crucial importance that some publisher gets convinced that I’m up to it…

Later in this Journal I will explain about the book I’m writing. Not now (hey, I need some way to let you come back later!).

Tomorrow I’m off to Amsterdam. From 2-4 August we’ll have YAPC::Europe there. I’m on the organizing committee, responsible for Sponsoring and Accomodation and tomorrow we’re going to stuff the bags with whatever the sponsors gave us. There are going to be some very nice items in the bags, like 3 CD’s: ActiveState’s ActiveCD, a recent CPAN mirror, and a CD with the proceedings of the talks.

I wonder when I find the time again to write another Journal…