Here's a tip. Don't start doing large-scale software updates on a computer a few hours before you want to use the computer to give a presentation.
Last night I was giving a cut-down version of my Idiomatic Perl tutorial to those lucky people at london.pm. This was going to involve me using a laptop that I hadn't used for some months. There was some pretty out of date software on there so I decided to update some of it. I was particularly interested in updated Galeon (and therefore Mozilla).
I fired up Red Hat's up2date program and asked it to update Galeon. It told me that it would need to update Mozilla as well. This made perfect sense so I just started the update.
Some time later the update "completed". I started Galeon, only to see it crash. Further investigation showed me that everything had been updated except the core Mozilla rpm. Now that shouldn't happen. up2date should ensure that all rpms are installed with the correct dependencies. I was left with a machine with no (decent) working browser and no time to install the correct rpms.
Luckily acme stepped in to help. He copied my slides onto his iBook and I did the presentation using that.
The tutorial seemed to go pretty well. I only did the first hour of so. It's weird doing a presentation like that to london.pm because so many of them already know everything in the tutorial. It's really aimed at people who have done a bit of Perl, but haven't yet got to grips with all of the clever stuff like references or modules. Still, I got some good feedback and suggestions and that can only make the tutorial better when I give it in San Diego.
And this morning, it only took half an hour to get the correct rpm and fix my laptop.
Maybe we could do print the tshirts...
