Smylers’ “Beginners guide to talking at conferences”
I ran in to Smylers’ Talking at Conferences: A Beginners’ Guide the other day. It’s a very useful distillation of things you should consider if you’re thinking of giving a talk at a technical conference, such as YAPC Europe 2007, where the talk was delivered.
One recommendation in particular struck me, in re ordering the material in a presentation effectively.
But there is one metric which can be applied to a talk safe in the knowledge that following it would have taken exactly the same preparation time: would the talk have been better had exactly the same content been presented but in the reverse order.
I’ll be keeping that in mind next time I have to present something.
Sendmail 8.14.0: Logging the GreetPause firing time
Following on from yesterday’s discussion of new features in Sendmail 8.14.0, today I’m writing about Sendmail’s GreetPause feature, and some additional logging for it that’s been added in Sendmail 8.14.0.
Sendmail 8.14.0: HeloName
Sendmail 8.14.0 was recently released, and it includes a small handful of patches that I sent in. The documentation explains what these options do, but doesn’t explain why you might want to use them. So I thought I’d do that in a series of entries here.
First, the new HeloName option.
Subversion UK User Group / Google open source jam writeup
Last Thursday (the 18th) I attended two open source events in London. The first was the third Subversion UK User Group meeting, and the second was Google’s second Open Source Jam.
Subversion commit access
I’m very pleased to say that I’ve just been granted with a partial commit bit for the Subversion source code. The developers have had enough of me popping up on the mailing list talking about issues with the Perl bindings and posting patches, and have given me the necessary access rights to fix and improve things myself.
As is traditional, my first commit was to the list of Subversion committers. This ensures that the ACLs are set up correctly and so on.
I’ll be working on the perl-bindings-improvements branch, making sure that they’re up to date with respect to the rest of Subversion, and that they behave as “Perlishly” as possible for anyone else who needs to interoperate with Subversion repositories using Perl.
Open Source support and OpenLogic
One of the common pieces of FUD used to argue against the use of open source software is “There’s no vendor support. If it breaks, who do we turn to?”.
There are a number of answers to this particular concern.
SVN::Web 0.50 released
After a slightly longer development process than I would have liked (I had several hard disks choose inopportune moments to go south — no data loss thanks to backups, but I took the opportunity to shuffle some hardware around), SVN::Web 0.50 has been released, and should now be available on CPAN.
There are quite a few significant changes in this version…
Subversion UK User Group / Google Open Source Jam, 18th January 2007
If you’re in London on Thursday 18th January and you’ve got an interest in Subversion then you might want to come along to the next Subversion UK User Group meeting. It’s at 3pm, there are directions and sign up instructions at that link.
I’ll be there, giving a tour of the Subversion related applications and tools that are available in the Perl space.
And after that it’s the first London Google Open Source Jam of 2007 — an opportunity to catch up with other open source developers, and find out more about interesting projects that people are working on.