Jouke

EuroOSCON day 0

This morning I left home around 9am and after a very tiring trip I arrived at my hotel in Brussels around 4pm. I wasn’t thinking about EuroOSCON too much yet (more about how to finish pStory), but I had planned to go to the early registration at 5pm.

That was a good thought. I ran into Aron and -o darn I can’t remember your name!-. We agreed to see each other again at 6 in front of the Plaza hotel to find a place to eat. When I got back, a lot of people from the EuroFoo were sitting in the lobby so I had to walk in and say hi to at least barbie, kudra, pdcawley, Jesse Vincent, Piers Harding and a few others. Later Jesse, Aron, Karen Pauley and -yes I still can’t remember your name- went to the Groote Markt to grab something to eat. We had a very good time talking about anything and everything.

These early meetups always get me in the right mood: there’s another conference coming up with many nice talks and lots of interesting people! Let the fun begin

YAPC::Europe – day two

Did I manage to finish my presentations last night? Yes. Did I feel satisfied? Not really. I felt ashamed actually. I still don’t know why, but I cannot get pVoice to work on my own laptop. It simply does nothing. No window. No error. Period.

Now, if I didn’t need the application itself, it wouldn’t matter that much, but instead I was to give a presentation about pVoice! Now how do I demonstrate an application without being able to run it? I didn’t know. Luckily I found an animated gif where (and old version of) pVoice is being demonstrated, and I used that instead.

So this morning at 10:10 I started the presentation for about 25 people in the Onion room. Although I felt very bad about not being able to actually demonstrate pVoice, I think the presentation went well. Or so I was told
After I finished Stray Toaster came up to me to tell me he was interested in contributing to the OA module I spoke about yesterday. And I was *very* delighted.

After the break I continued with my “Introduction to wxPerl” presentation, where I worked through by showing different examples, and changing them as I showed where to find the syntax of different methods in the documentation. The main complaint I think wxPerl is getting, is that it’s poorly documented. That is so untrue. The problem is that people just don’t know where to find the documentation or actually, how to use it properly. So my main focus was on finding the information you need in the documentation by showing examples that are readable and simple enough to extend.

By the way, I put links to the slides and the example code on [URL:http://wiki.birmingham2006.com].

After lunch I ran into my booking.com colleague Jacqueline Kerkmeijer, who represents our HR department here. We (booking.com) are desperately seeking qualified people and that’s the main reason for us to sponsor YAPC. So Jaqueline is running the Booking.com booth at the conference, and I’ve seen her talking to quite a few interested people. Let’s hope she’s able to find a Few Good Men (or Women).

YAPC::Europe – day one

Yesterday evening I went to the Panama bar to meet up with the people who had already arrived for the conference. Having not been to the last two YAPC::Eu’s, it was good to see all familiar faces again (and drinking a few beers with them ).

I went back to the hotel on time to try and fix a few bugs in the OA-module-to-be, because I wanted to show a little of it in my presentation of today. As I’m writing this, I’m attending the “The Inaccessibility of Perl” presentation by Stray Toaster, and I’ve just finished the last slides of my presentation of this afternoon.

Now I still have the other two presentations to finish, which I will be doing tomorrow. Since I’ve done both of them before, I hope it’s merely a matter of updating these…I guess there will be no socialising tonight, but preparing instead…There are still more nights to catch up with that…

Arriving in Birmingham

This afternoon I arrived in Birmingham for YAPC::Europe. The flight on the KLM Cityhopper was pleasant and swift, and as it turns out, the weather here is no different than in Holland

I had thought that immediately after checking into my hotel (the MacDonald Burlington) I could start writing the slides of my talk tomorrow “Accessible Applications in Perl”. However, I hadn’t even landed yet and the office called to check if I had been able to work out the Unicode bugs in SAP::Rfc with Piers Harding. Last night I had left the office very late while knowing that SAP::Rfc crashes in certain situations (when the last character of a field is a multi-byte unicode character), and I didn’t know yet if Piers was able to fix it yet.

So I checked into my hotel, unpacked, opened up the lid of my laptop to find an open wifi hotspot, logged on, mailed Piers, and within minutes we were chatting and testing. At 5:30 (CET, I’m not yet functioning in BST) everything worked, I called the office to tell them, and I could finally start writing slides ;-(

As I write this, I have just finished the last slide (it’s 6:30 BST now), but I really need to test it out to see if I have enough to fill the 20 minutes, or maybe even too much…

First off to grab some dinner and then back to the hotel to finish everything.

YAPC::EU preparations

Why is it always so that I start with my presentations on the last days before conferences? This time I think it’s not too difficult to explain: I only sent in my proposals on the last day, and expected to present only my pVoice presentation. However, all three presentations were accepted, and I had to prepare my ‘Accessible applications in Perl’, ‘pVoice’ and ‘Introduction to wxPerl’ talks.

Since then, work was extremely demanding, and when my holiday started, I got caught up with doing stuff with my kids so much, that there wasn’t any time left to do anything else. Although I must say that part of that was writing a new application for Krista, based upon my new OA module, which of course I can use for my first presentation.

This Sunday, my kids will return to their mother, Monday will be a day at the office in Amsterdam, and Tuesday I’ll be leaving for Birmingham already. If I weren’t going to work with Piers Harding tonight to make sure the new Unicode compatible SAP::Rfc works for Booking.com, and I wasn’t going to visit my sister for her birthday on Saturday (with the whole family of course), who lives in the other side of the country, I could say I have enough time to work on my presentations.

I have to really, really get it done in the spare moments I have left or else….

Euro OSCON

In case you missed it, last week was the first Euro OSCON in Amsterdam. I had a great time there. Of course it helped that I saw a great many people who I already knew, but I also got to knew some interesting new people.

One of the people I had the pleasure to meet was Fernando Botelho. He recently wrote an article for MAKE Magazine [makezine.com] called “Let There Be Speech”, about how to build a $200 computer for blind kids. He is visually impaired himself, so who would be more into the subject than him? We decided to keep in touch and see how we can help each other. We might be targetting a slightly different audience (he targets people who are/work with blind kids, I target people who can’t speak), but there may be enough synergy to work together.

I also presented my talk “pVoice: Open Source Assistive Technology”, which was well received I think. The presentation didn’t exactly go as planned and I hopelessly ran out of time (as usual), but that may also have been caused by the many questions people asked. All in all I just hope that it had the desired effect: getting more people interested in creating “open” Assistive Technology.
I at least hope that it have this effect, because I’m feeling less motivated in the last 12 months being some kind of “one crying in the wilderness” being one of the very few working in this area and getting hardly any help.

Like I mentioned in my presentation: people keep telling me that pVoice is such a great thing, that it’s such a nice example of Open Source. Well, I think it’s a bad example of Open Source. One of the reasons why people make their projects Open Source is to attract more developers. At least, it was one of my motivations. And except lots of response from people who downloaded it and thank me for giving away the software for free (which is of course nice to hear), I could have made it closed source and still have given it away for free. But that wasn’t the idea.

I’ve now worked on pVoice for almost 5 years. If you consider the sourcecode, it’s not all that impressive. It’s not a sexy piece of software, and it isn’t supposed to be. Nevertheless, it has the looks of a professional piece of software, and people are really using it. And most important of all, it helps people.

Now, enough ranting about not getting any help. Don’t worry that I’ll quit working on it any time soon. I recently started to port pVoice to OS X and Linux, and although there’s quite some tweaking to be done to get it to the level of releasing a version on those platforms, it might convince people to help out. Working only on Windows for the past years may have been the reason why I couldn’t get anyone else interested to work on it (so it may all have been my fault).

I’ll see how it goes. I originally thought that my Euro OSCON presentation would have been the last talk about pVoice I would do, but having seen the theme of next year’s YAPC::Europe (“The Accessibility Of Perl”) it may be that this conference may be the perfect opportunity to give one last talk about pVoice. But then it will be over I think. I’ve talked about pVoice on every conference I’ve attended (YAPC::Europe 2001 until Euro OSCON 2005) and if (perl) people still haven’t heard about it, there’s nothing I can do about it I think…

OSCON day 3

Besides attending some talks, I spent most of this day preparing and giving my own talk.

I got a very flattering introduction by Damian Conway, who explained that after his Presentation Aikido talk, several people had come up and asked him to introduce them, just like I did. He told the audience he had turned them all down, except me. If that’s not flattering…

Anyway, although there were only a few people in the room, the talk went very well I think, and the people that were there, were really interested in the subject. It showed, because they kept asking questions during the talk, especially during the demo. I had planned the demo to last for not more than 15 minutes, but because all kinds of questions kept being asked (and I was too enthusiastic about the subject not to answer them), the demo took more than 30 minutes. In a 45 minute talk, that means you’re running hopelessly out of time. I had not kept track of time, and after the demo I had only 3 minutes left, and slides for 15 minutes. I rushed through the last part, which wasn’t a good plan on hindsight.

The good thing is that most people kept asking questions and giving suggestions after I left the room. I actually even got the offer of someone who wanted to help out improving the online help for pVoice. This is a good thing since it will greatly improve the useability of the software.

After I finished talking with the audience, I ran downstairs to the ‘Works in Progress’ session to do the last part of the presentation again. I had only 10 minutes in this session, and used it as a ‘Cry for Help’. Let me use this journal entry as another Cry for Help. I need people to help with development. I don’t expect anyone to spend as much time on pVoice as I do, but I hope people will help porting pVoice to other platforms, especially Linux and Mac OS X. It really shouldn’t be too hard. It’s all written in Perl and uses wxPerl as the GUI library. wxPerl compiles on many platforms (including OS X), but I know I’ve used several Win32 specific calls, and there really should be workarounds for those calls on other platforms. Eventually I should be able to port pVoice to linux myself, but I don’t own a Mac, so I can’t do that myself.
The Speech synthesis is done in only one subroutine, so it shouldn’t be too hard to make that work on other platforms too. I’m still planning to write a generic TTS (Text To Speech) module that interfaces with the different TTS modules for different platforms. If I find the time. If someone else does it, I’ll use that and it will be a huge step towards making pVoice multi-platform.

The slides of my talk (for those who didn’t have the chance to be there) are on http://jouke.pvoice.org/oscon-2004/index.html, so take a look at that to find out what pVoice is all about these days.

OSCON day 2

The second day of tutorials for me consisted mainly of hallway converstations. For a while I was at Rocco’s POE tutorial, but I couldn’t really concentrate, so I decided to be better off leaving and thinking about my own presentation the next day.

I had short conversations with people like Tim O’Reilly, Damian, Ovid, “cLive;-)”, kudra, (Josh)ua, petdance and many more. This is the great part of conferences: the social networking thing.

The evening was fun with Larry’s State of the Onion, Paul Graham’s talk on Hacking and Damian’s ‘Life, the Universe and Everything’. I had seen Damian’s talk in Germany two years ago, but he has made quite a few changes in it, which make it sound as if it were almost a new talk. It was hilarious (or how you are supposed to spell that anyway).

I tried to get my talk for the third day rescheduled, only to find out that ‘The Daily Source’ had already gone into print, so there couldn’t be any more changes. Instead I found Damian willing to introduce me for my talk, and I’ve arranged a short talk on pVoice during the ‘Works in Progress’ session, because I heard many people say “if your talk wouldn’t be scheduled with the Lightning talks, I’d surely be there”. Now there’s a chance for them to go and listen to what I have to say

It was about 2am when I went to bed, and 8 when I got up, so I’m quite tired. Still, the talk has been finished on time, and I have enough adrenaline in my vains to stay awake…let’s see how it goes…

OSCON day 1

We’re approaching the end of the first day of tutorials. My first day consisted of listening to Damian and to Damian.

The first talk was ‘Best Practice Perl’, which was -as usual with Damians talks- a good one. I didn’t agree with everything he mentioned, and as he said, that wasn’t nessecary, but he certainly brought up a good number of useful points I hadn’t really thought of.

Now I’m at the ‘Presentation Aikido’ talk. Really, really having a good time here. I definately need to work on my slides again tonight.

Of course I’ve seen a number of people I saw again for the first time, and others I hadn’t seen for far too long. These include (but are not limited to…I’m good at forgetting things) cwest, kudra, schwern, dha, merlyn, sky, petdance and some others…

I have no clue what I’m going to do tonight, other than review my slides, because I got many good ideas from Damian’s last talk. Maybe I’ll just keep hanging around in the lobby…

OSCON day 0

It’s nice to be in Portland before everyone else does. Actually checking in in the hotel on Saturday and spending most of Saturday and Sunday in the hotel lobby allows you to see all the regular visitors of the hotel go, and the geeks coming in.

While I was practising my worst habit (smoking), Saturday evening, suddenly Nick Clark stood before me. He was the first familiar face to show up here. Sunday, Jesse Vincent and a few others showed up. We quickly formed the first group of people wearing geekshirts, working op laptops and discussing Perl there.

Around 4 Ingy, Autrijus and Whiteg arrived and some 10 of us went to a cheap but tasty Mexican restaurant. Now, the forementioned three and I are sitting in our hotelroom which has been transformed to some kind of dorm. Wireless access here, so we’re happy

I’m all set for day 1!