Jouke

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!