Presentations - Argh!

So once more I find myself preparing to give a presentation to a group of (mostly) strangers, scary much? This time it's on "How to run a successful Open Source project", a topic that I have lots of opinions on having spent the last 8-9 years involved in several projects.

There is a ton of good literature on how to run an effective presentation ("talk like so", "make slides like that"), but since I'm a geek I'm just going to mention the help that modern technology has given me :).

Firstly on the way back from a Hi-Di-Hi! style holiday camp (much fun, go the Falconry lesson!), I was able to use my Wife's Samsung NC10 Netbook to hastily finish off the first draft of the presentation. It's amazing what you can type out on that little monster even when crammed into the back seat of a non people carrier. Oh and thank you good genes for not making me carsick, very useful trait that.

Next up is the use of MS Powerpoint. Yes it's much maligned but it still beats writing notes up on a whiteboard with your back to the crowd. It also helps to have a Wife who happens to be a Graphic Designer, pretty Powerpoint template heaven!

Then there's the borrowing of my Flatmate's Macbook Pro to run the presentation from (not all of us can wear turtlenecks ;p).

Last but not least there's the use of the iClicker utility for the iPhone. I can go back and forth through the slides and have a mini representation of each slide in front of my nose, again I don't have to turn my back on the audience which is a good thing. Bonus points to the developers of this utility for allowing you to swap between the notes for the slide and the slide contents itself.

I'll post the post-mortem on the talk sometime tomorrow, assuming I don't incite the crowd into rioting (IT people are generally far more passionate than people give them credit for).

Symbolic Linking ahoy!

Learned a handy new trick today! I was trying to roll out some pre-prepared Jboss servers with some symbolically linked directories. I completely forgot that when you unzip these that the symbolic linking is gone.

A quick hopeful trip to the man page for zip reveals this:

-y Store symbolic links as such in the zip archive, instead of compressing and storing the file referred to by the link (UNIX only).

They think of everything :). It's little things like this that remind me to RTFM before I go and blindly do things.

As a side note, applying customer patches for Jboss-eap-4.3 is not as straight forward as it should be. You effectively have to roll out brand new servers and their associated server instances and then copy your applications and configurations across (making sure of course that they're customer patch compatible). Jboss responded and say they're going to try and do better the next customer patch, will be interesting to see if they succeed...