Jouke

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….

YAPC::Europe and other things

Well, YAPC::Europe is over. I came, I saw and I spoke. Unfortunately I wasn’t really in the mood to celebrate it all the way because of some unfortunate personal circumstances. People might have noticed I wasn’t quite there with my mind. I didn’t go to any BOF’s, nor the speakers dinner. Better luck next year.

The tutorial I did about wxPerl was received quite well. Interesting thing was that Redvers Davies and Johan Lindstrom were there (knowing much about Gtk and Win32::GUI respectively), I knew a bit about Tk and wxPerl, so nice comparisions could be made.

Thinking about the German Perl Workshop already

YAPC::Europe??

OK, last Friday kane was at my house and we had a good time, drinking alcohol, teasing my girlfriend, listening to Pink Floyd. And then suddenly he offered me the chance of going to YAPC::Europe after all. That is, if kudra can’t go. Which would be a pity for her, but great for me.

So tomorrow night I’ll know.

This weekend I’ve put all my private projects in CVS, something I should have done a long time ago, but never did. Too lazy I guess.

I never thought I’d convert to having a Win32 platform as my development platform. But when you’re developing applications for Win32 users, there is not much of a choice.

I’m considering VMWare again….

No YAPC::Europe either

OK, so except for the German Perl Workshop (which was a great event by the way) I’m going to miss all Perl events this year. I missed YAPC::NA, OSCON and now I’ll even miss YAPC::Europe.

I expected to have enough money by then to be able to go, but I am still waiting for the payment of a lot of money and even have to pay for legal costs (attorneys cost a lot of money you know) to get the payment of my work in January. And even then it’s not certain I’ll get it all.

So this will be a YAPC-less year for me

In the mean time I’m still busy with The Perl Academy. I’ve done a mailing to some 200 companies that might be interested in having Perl trainings, but the response is not really overwhelming. I’ll have until the end of this month to be able to cancel my reservations of the classrooms (or else I’ll have to pay the whole amount they would cost if I actually use them, which is not my intention…). Maybe a more direct approach is nessecary to find customers…

Anyway, let’s see what these days in August will bring…

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…