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by Chris Winters.
Original Post: Ongoing work: presentations, wikis and undertime
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I haven't posted for a while, mostly just recharging. I'm not as
young as I used to be and when I work a ton for a week or two to get a
release out the door I need another week or two to start giving a shit
about programming again. Peopleware
refers to this as "undertime" -- a reaction to overtime -- and
while a natural reaction may be "you're just a lazy bastard" it's hard
to argue when you're in the middle of it. (Plus it's allergy season,
which seems to sap all excess energy for a few weeks.)
Enough navel gazing. What I'm working on now is:
the OpenInteract2 presentation/tutorial I'm giving at YAPC in 39
days (and counting),
getting OI2 2.0 out the door before then (or at least beta 4)
building a wiki for requirements management using CGI::Wiki (more on
this later)
For the first item I'm experimenting with a new presentation
software. Previously I've used a homegrown HTML slide generator --
like object-relational mappers and templating systems, I think this is
something that every Perl hacker creates at least over a career. (All
of my presentations from
2003 and 2004 use some form of this.)
The problem is that HTML slides are tough to disseminate for
offline viewing, and they aren't very pretty. So I asked Tom how he made his
presentations to the Pittsburgh
Perlmongers so beautiful. (Here's a sample
presentation about the linux-based Asterisk PBX system, with additional
info if you're interested in the system itself.)
His short answer: LaTeX. His long answer: a system that takes a
text file in emacs outline mode runs it through a Haskell program that
generates the appropriate LaTeX markup and then formats it using Beamer for PDF
output. (There are a few other steps along the way.) Tom took a lot of
time to walk me through his system and I now have everything setup and
working to generate my own. So now I just need to write it...
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