To my surprise, several people have asked for the slides from my Øredev talk on Higher Order Javascript, and I’ve followed my usual practice of saying “Sorry, no”. Slide decks are a terrible teaching medium - they’re fine if they come with the presenter, but if they contain enough information to read as if they were a book, then I’m prepared to bet that they made a terrible presentation. Good presentations have a synergy; slides illustrate what the speaker is saying and neither the speech nor the slides should really stand alone. After all, if either could, why bother with the other?
Crikey! What an intense few days.
Last Friday, I got some email from Giles Bowkett saying that he’d had to flake on a conference in Sweden and could I take his place. The brief was to “be interesting, and I know you can nail that in your sleep”.
Last Saturday, I read it. And being flattered by Giles’s silver tongue answered to say “Probably, when is it?”.
While I was at OSCON I found myself chatting with various non-perl and ex-perl folks and many of them had the same impression of Perl as a great language for hacking out short scripts to get stuff done, right now and possibly under severe time pressure. For these people, those scripts would very rapidly become unmaintainable. And it’s easy to see why they came to that conclusion. Perl was originally designed and implemented by a systems administrator as a tool to make his every day tasks easier so there are a bunch of shortcuts and defaults that do exactly that - make Larry’s life in 1987 easier. Which is great when you’re whipping up a script to meet an immediate demand, but horrendously cryptic when you look at it later.
If you’re interested in the repertoire project, here’s my current rules of engagement for recording for it:
- One Song
- One Mic
- One Take (by which I mean no comping or overdubs, not “only one attempt”)
So far, everything has been recorded using FiRe, a dead simple field recording app on the iPhone/iPad and uploaded pretty much directly from the phone to SoundCloud, though I am thinking of switching to using my BandCamp account because, although the player may not be as pretty, the site is free. SoundCloud keeps nagging me to switch to a paid account if I want to do things like make everything downloadable or see more advanced player statistics. Very annoying.
Right, I've about had it up to here with the Xkb documentation, and with the layout of my shiny new Kinesis Advantage Keyboard. The cursor keys on the kinesis are horribly situated. What I'd like to do is hit a key (AltGr, say) and have it put the keyboard into a navigation mode, with the arrow keys mapped onto WASD and possibly HKJL and, ideally with Home/End, PgUp, PgDn in sensible places as well, then, once I've done, hit the mode switch key again and I can carry on programming. Adding a chording key as well would be good, or, better, arranging things so that if I use the mode switch key as if it were a non-locking key then it'll Do The Right Thing.
