Open Source Developers Club
Last night we had another Open
Source Developers Club (OSDClub) meeting. I had volunteered
my talk on An Illustrated History of Failure, and
Simon Hildebrant had volunteered a talk on Selenium.
The night seemed to go well, but I can't help but be disappointed with my performance. I've been teaching all this week, and this is extremely time consuming. Waking up very early and then standing in front of a class for eight hours can sure be tiring, but that's not the real problem. After a full day of teaching, the last thing I want to be doing is spending an hour or more rehearsing my talk. I'd much rather be playing Pikmin (thanks Ian!), or mucking with technorati, or even watching commercial TV. This is especially the case when I've been teaching roughly every second week for the last two months.
I hold myself to a particularly high standard when it comes to presentations. Presenting is my job, and if I flub my lines or forget my slide order, then I'm extremely unhappy. For anyone who noticed my errors last night, I apologise. For anyone who didn't notice, thank-you. You're a great audience.
Simon's presentation last night was on testing the web with Selenium, which is an awesome tool, and which has lots of ways to plug into TAP and other testing frameworks. There were some interesting ideas being thrown around about how one can use Selenium to provide repeatable test cases for web applications, the same way that one would provide test cases when submitting a bug report for a traditional application.
The discussion got me thinking more about what if one finds a bug, but can't get it fixed. It's a good introduction to my next talk, which is Fixing the web with Greasemonkey.
Re:Slides?
pjf on 2007-08-10T07:41:57
Most of my presentations (including this one) are designed to be run with a real person presenting them. As an example, the failure talk is 150 slides in about 25 minutes, and a lot of those are pictures. It is not death by powerpoint. Unless you're hearing the talk, the pictures don't make (as much) sense, and you'll be disappointed. I don't want that.
I'm currently looking at using SlideCasting to put the slides online synchronized with my audio. If I can get that working, then it will definitely be mentioned in my blog.
Re:Slides?
jjore on 2007-08-11T18:06:26
That's kind of unfortunate. A benefit of death by powerpoint is that the information is portable and doesn't require a human to perform.
