Into Africa
Sunday, 18. October 2009, 12:53:51
Well, not really. More like flying over it all... I went to South Africa for a few days, and was pleasantly surprised by some of what I found (and just surprised by some other bits) ...
Posts tagged with "presents"
Learning Portunhol
Thursday, 14. May 2009, 02:27:52
I am on another Opera University Tour, this time to Brazil. And to the general surprise of everyone (including me) I have done all the presentations in something which is tending towards portuguese...
Back from great BarCamp
Wednesday, 22. April 2009, 17:38:07
Thanks to everyone in Kazakhstan, organisers and helpers and participants. You made what started as a miserable trip into an excellent BarCamp that others will strive to match.
Now I am in Spain for a couple of very formal events and a tour of universities, before a two-week speaking tour of Brazil. Meanwhile, the work piles up...
Now I am in Spain for a couple of very formal events and a tour of universities, before a two-week speaking tour of Brazil. Meanwhile, the work piles up...
BarCamp Blogpost!
Saturday, 18. April 2009, 06:29:55
Yes! I am blogging from the BarCamp that I set out for a couple of days ago...
Çok sağ olun
Sunday, 29. March 2009, 09:05:39
BarCamp Caspian is mostly done - although there are still things to see and do, the end is much closer as the beginning. Some thoughts...
Turbo in Texas
Sunday, 22. March 2009, 16:32:27
South by South West - panels, weather and Opera Turbo surprises
On the road again...
Thursday, 5. March 2009, 20:34:51
A bunch of upcoming travel. SxSW where I get to watch my sister's new film, Azerbaijan and Mozambique (two new countries in a week), Boston, and a brief stop at home. That's what the rest of March looks like...
Latterly...
Wednesday, 18. February 2009, 18:15:15
I went to BarCamp Baltics, in Latvia - and more specifically in Riga, but now that I can add a new country to my "visited countries" list.
Oops!
Monday, 3. November 2008, 09:12:37
I set out Wednesday for the travel that includes a University Tour in Russia. So far it is an interesting trip...
The joy of Jetlag...
Sunday, 7. October 2007, 22:05:15
I am suppoesd to be asleep. I have to be up early tomorrow. But I was at two great conferences recently, and squeezed in some travel...
Wii, Austin...
Friday, 16. March 2007, 07:18:27
An entry got wiped by user error. This is a reconstruction made using the best scientific principes available (Who said "Make-it-up"? 
)
)Assembly required...
Tuesday, 4. July 2006, 18:49:21
I am going to Finland for Assembly '06 at the start of August. The event sounds like fun, like the Gathering (the one in Norway, not the medieval event in Australia). It will be hard, just a few of us have to man a stand 24 hours a day, as well as give talks and maybe an online workshop or two, but hopefully we will get to meet a bunch more Opera users and community members, see some cool new widgets developed, and enjoy ourselves enough to cope with the stress 
Afterwards I will get to see a new country - we have planned to spend a couple of days in Talinn, Estonia, to make up for our lost weekend. So I should find some time to resurrect my SVG map that let you interactively say where you have been. (The code is the easy part. The hard bit is gettting the data in the first place).
At some point I am also going to visit a friend's grave in Finland. It's not quite so much fun as geeking out and having drinks with people, but it is important to me (and some other close friends of his who are going). I don't go to a lot of graves or anything, although cemeteries are pretty relaxing places. But this involves some important unfinished business.
Anyway, if you're passing through Helsinki at that time and interested in the gathering, come and say hello (Opera is a sponsor and will have a stand, so we should be easy enough to find). Likewise if you're interested in a chat over a beer in Talinn on the 7th or 8th of August, or have a recommendation for where to do that, please let me know (search engines know my email address). I have never been there before, so I am looking forward to it.
Afterwards I will get to see a new country - we have planned to spend a couple of days in Talinn, Estonia, to make up for our lost weekend. So I should find some time to resurrect my SVG map that let you interactively say where you have been. (The code is the easy part. The hard bit is gettting the data in the first place).
At some point I am also going to visit a friend's grave in Finland. It's not quite so much fun as geeking out and having drinks with people, but it is important to me (and some other close friends of his who are going). I don't go to a lot of graves or anything, although cemeteries are pretty relaxing places. But this involves some important unfinished business.
Anyway, if you're passing through Helsinki at that time and interested in the gathering, come and say hello (Opera is a sponsor and will have a stand, so we should be easy enough to find). Likewise if you're interested in a chat over a beer in Talinn on the 7th or 8th of August, or have a recommendation for where to do that, please let me know (search engines know my email address). I have never been there before, so I am looking forward to it.
launching...
Friday, 23. June 2006, 17:47:13
As everyone probably knows already, Opera 9 launched on Tuesday in Seattle. I was there. For a while it seemed like a close-run thing - I was in New York the day before, and had to be back the day after, for W3C meetings. I got a red-eye flight each way.
On the way there we were delayed 5 hours - first by a weather problem, then, when we got in the plane and were taxiing to the runway, the engine flared as they started it. Passengers in the back saw the flames and freaked out, to the point that we had to go back to the terminal and change from one perfectly good plane to another. So I was extremely tired when I got there.
I presented widgets. Being extremely tired, I had them on a USB stick rather than copying across to the machine we were presenting on - a Mac, also using Parallels to show windows. Big mistake. First, the USB stick was taken out of the machine so I couldn't find my cool in-development previews at the crucial moment
When I did get going, Parallels had done something wierd and we had no keyboard (I was using keyboard-controlled widgets) so I switched to the Mac native. In the end it worked out ok.
So I left the party and went back to New York. Well, to the airport, where the flight was delayed and I didn't have a seat In the end I got a bump. Which meant I was very late into New York, but that I got upgraded so slept on the plane a bit, which was nice.
And Opera 9 is out. I like it - I have been using it for quite a while aready. My favourite things are standards improvements - XSLT, good SVG, the WHAT WG-specified Audio() thing and a handful of other minor stuff, plus widgets, BitTorrent, the source editor, and the error console (which provides debug information for all knds of things).
Liking the source editor surprised me. I don't normally like to edit source (I prefer to use Amaya for HTML and SVG since it makes nice clean code and leaves me to think about content) but being able to test quick stuff easily is nice.
It's been a hard week. I'm looking forward to relaxing a little (in part by working on some of the cool stuff for Opera 10 )
On the way there we were delayed 5 hours - first by a weather problem, then, when we got in the plane and were taxiing to the runway, the engine flared as they started it. Passengers in the back saw the flames and freaked out, to the point that we had to go back to the terminal and change from one perfectly good plane to another. So I was extremely tired when I got there.
I presented widgets. Being extremely tired, I had them on a USB stick rather than copying across to the machine we were presenting on - a Mac, also using Parallels to show windows. Big mistake. First, the USB stick was taken out of the machine so I couldn't find my cool in-development previews at the crucial moment
When I did get going, Parallels had done something wierd and we had no keyboard (I was using keyboard-controlled widgets) so I switched to the Mac native. In the end it worked out ok.So I left the party and went back to New York. Well, to the airport, where the flight was delayed and I didn't have a seat
In the end I got a bump. Which meant I was very late into New York, but that I got upgraded so slept on the plane a bit, which was nice.And Opera 9 is out. I like it - I have been using it for quite a while aready. My favourite things are standards improvements - XSLT, good SVG, the WHAT WG-specified Audio() thing and a handful of other minor stuff, plus widgets, BitTorrent, the source editor, and the error console (which provides debug information for all knds of things).
Liking the source editor surprised me. I don't normally like to edit source (I prefer to use Amaya for HTML and SVG since it makes nice clean code and leaves me to think about content) but being able to test quick stuff easily is nice.
It's been a hard week. I'm looking forward to relaxing a little (in part by working on some of the cool stuff for Opera 10
)Standard presentation stuff
Sunday, 7. May 2006, 18:45:03
I give a lot of presentations for someone who is working in engineering. (On the other hand I don't do so much engineering). I believe I have never written powerpoint slides, although I have made a few hundred slidesets in the last decade.
Since the presentation I gave as part of my job interview for Opera, all my presentations have been done using "OperaShow" - which is really nothing more than taking advantage of the fact that Opera implements the @projection media type defined for CSS in the late 1990's. I apply a style sheet, switch to projection mode, and voilà! As an added bonus, I can link a different, mobile style sheet, and make mobile-friendly slides as part of the same presentation. Not slides relying on having powerpoint in a high-end device in your pocket - they work fine with Opera mini on all kinds of phones, and they are exactly the same file I am using to project onto the big screen. Keeping to the rule of not sending a phone more than 20k in total, of course.
I used to use W3C's slidemaker, a simple tool in PERL that would take an HTML page, and turn it into a set of pages designed for presentation at various sizes, linked together, or Fundaación Sidar's version of it that had a few nicer features such as supporting multiple languages better. I even worked on the code for them, adding some accessibility features and other functionality. There are a number of newer tools that break a page into something that can be used for projecting - Dave Raggett's Slidy, Eric Meyer's S5, Hoylen Sue's JackSVG, are among those I have personally looked at but never used "in action".
The benefit of all these tools is that they are based on standard formats - HTML, XHTML or SVG. You can take the basic slides, and manipulate them using any tool you like, or edit their source in a text editor. You can look at them in any kind of browser.
And yet, in a couple of weeks, I am supposed to talk about the benefits of standards - how they make things simple for users and authors, and more importantly cheaper for developers, by supporting a choice of tools not a monopoly lock-in. And they ask for my slides in Powerpoint.
Sorry folks, you're going to have to have it in an open standard format. I haven't had a copy of powerpoint since I last uninstalled it more than 5 years ago. I haven't missed it, either as an author (I can use standards that are easier to work with) or reader (if someone feels obliged to send me a powerpoint, after cursing themm for the bandwidth I can open it in Open Office if I have to). I certainly don't feel the urge to go out and buy it, just so I can make it hard to share my talks, yet no easier to protect them if I were so inclined.
Since the presentation I gave as part of my job interview for Opera, all my presentations have been done using "OperaShow" - which is really nothing more than taking advantage of the fact that Opera implements the @projection media type defined for CSS in the late 1990's. I apply a style sheet, switch to projection mode, and voilà! As an added bonus, I can link a different, mobile style sheet, and make mobile-friendly slides as part of the same presentation. Not slides relying on having powerpoint in a high-end device in your pocket - they work fine with Opera mini on all kinds of phones, and they are exactly the same file I am using to project onto the big screen. Keeping to the rule of not sending a phone more than 20k in total, of course.
I used to use W3C's slidemaker, a simple tool in PERL that would take an HTML page, and turn it into a set of pages designed for presentation at various sizes, linked together, or Fundaación Sidar's version of it that had a few nicer features such as supporting multiple languages better. I even worked on the code for them, adding some accessibility features and other functionality. There are a number of newer tools that break a page into something that can be used for projecting - Dave Raggett's Slidy, Eric Meyer's S5, Hoylen Sue's JackSVG, are among those I have personally looked at but never used "in action".
The benefit of all these tools is that they are based on standard formats - HTML, XHTML or SVG. You can take the basic slides, and manipulate them using any tool you like, or edit their source in a text editor. You can look at them in any kind of browser.
And yet, in a couple of weeks, I am supposed to talk about the benefits of standards - how they make things simple for users and authors, and more importantly cheaper for developers, by supporting a choice of tools not a monopoly lock-in. And they ask for my slides in Powerpoint.
Sorry folks, you're going to have to have it in an open standard format. I haven't had a copy of powerpoint since I last uninstalled it more than 5 years ago. I haven't missed it, either as an author (I can use standards that are easier to work with) or reader (if someone feels obliged to send me a powerpoint, after cursing themm for the bandwidth I can open it in Open Office if I have to). I certainly don't feel the urge to go out and buy it, just so I can make it hard to share my talks, yet no easier to protect them if I were so inclined.
Sliding into mobile phones
Monday, 21. November 2005, 23:35:56
I gave a talk in London last week, at the W3C's Mobile Web event there. Lots of the folks were talking about the future, how some day people with super-expensive phones would be able to get the Web to do stuff for them.
In the meantime, I had decided to do some work on my style. I'm not really a great one for design, as many people know. I like pretty simple layouts, plain colours, and I tend not to do much to adjust whatever default style I get (except to make text bigger, which I nearly always do).
(This uses some CSS 2 - the counter won't work on some basic browsers, but the content is still there):
I managed to get the same slides to appear in fullscreen mode (the OperaShow presentation mode), in a different style for normal on-screen reading, and to show them on my phone in a presentationoptimised for the phone. It wasn't rocket science, and I thought I would share how I did it. (Thanks Tommy for the photographic evidence that this works on a real phone running Opera Mini)
(The next bit involves digging into the HTML source code. If you think that's boring, skip to the slides themselves - if you have Opera you can switch from fullscreen (which won't work before December - only the mobile version is uploaded) to small screen rendering and see how it comes out, then write a comment saying "Oooh, Aaaah" and I will be grateful ).
So what did I do? The first thing was to write some slides, to use OperaShow. I originally did this with the online tool, because it made the stylesheet for me. I copied the entire stylesheet into a seperated file, and I edited it a bit. Then I started to look at my own slides. I had some simple XHTML - this is what OperaShow is based on - its structure is the one I got from teh generator, and it works well for me even after hacking around. I added a link to the external stylesheet I had created, and said it was for several media types:
<link rel="style" type="text/css" href="slides.css" [B]media="print, tv, projection, screen"[/B] />Then I added an internal stylesheet:
<style type="text/css" [B]media="handheld"[/B]><[CDATA[ /* Style rules go here */ ]]> </style>(Why the funny extra brackets? Because this is real XHTML, following real XML rules. Just in case someone wants to build a really basic browser that only understands real XML, and skips all the error-correcting that Opera does to make the web that's out there actually work).
What rules do I actually put in? The following isn't exactly the same as the source. I've improved a bit, left out a few repetitive things, but you should get the idea. The first ones are to reduce the margins, padding and so on to something more obvious for mobiles, and remove the big bullets from lists. Stuff like:
ul,ol,ul li { margin: 3px ; padding: 3px ; list-style: none }
There are a number of images used in the screen and projection version. Most of them are more than 50kb, they are fairly large, and they are not really cool for mobiles. Fortunately, they are all styled with a couple of classes. I added a link to a very small, mobile-optimised picture, and gave it a special class that is set not to render in the linked stylsheet. While I was there, I decided to tell a logo image to show itself small (it's not too heavy, but its normal size was much too big), and I decided the first slide was not worth seeing as a slide. Those two things have an id, so I styled them too.
#mwi {width:55px;height:58px}
.r {float:right; padding:0px; margin:0px}
.topleft, .right, #s1 {display:none}
Then I decided I wanted to make the slides stand out a bit. Put a box around them, add a little slide number to each box, like a real slideset (This uses some CSS 2 - the counter won't work on some basic browsers, but the content is still there):
div.slide { counter-increment: slide; }
.slide { border: 1px black solid; padding: 4px; margin: 0px 0px 5px}
.slide:before { content: "Slide " counter(slide); float:right; }
By this time, I was messing around in the depths of stylesheets I never really understood before. (I found things like background images included through the use of data: URIs and all sorts of wierd and wonderful stuff). One of the things I found in the print style was that it put lots of metadata into the print version, but I was too slack to add metadata yet. (I'll dig back in and do that, because it is pretty useful as well as cool to see it printing). But I did use a couple of rules I found to add some simple metadata:
head { display: block; border: 1px black; padding:5px; width:100%}
title { display: block; padding: 0px; margin: 0px;
text-align:center ; font-weight: bold;}
If you look at the real source, you'll see the slight differences. You can look at how the other stylesheets work, too. But you're better off asking a different expert about the details of those - all I did that was special is trim them down to something I can manage, and make the mobile-friendly version work. (Even then, I could have done a bit more... maybe next time I'll explain that instead).
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