Jouke

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…