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).
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.
I disagree; while I personally can translate from C or C++ API documentation into the appropriate Perl calls (with some effort), I much prefer to steal code from decent Perl examples.
If I put on my editor hat, could I offer you or another wxPerl guru money to create and document more Perl examples?
