Tag Archives: talk

Refactoring LibreOffice

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The FOSDEM 2013 talks are up now, and this one of LibreOffice Refactoring really hit an interesting mark. The LibreOffice team has been aggressively rebuilding a culture of rapid change as a road to quality, bringing in a test and test automation culture, and leaving nearly no parts of the code as sacred.

It’s interesting that LibreOffice seems to be doing a much better job than OpenOffice at removing technical debt. I think we’re already seeing the effect of that cultural split, and I expect that in the future this is going to get far more obvious.

I can’t wait to get the Android remote working for future presentations. Will be a lot of fun to drive my presentations that way.

Upcoming Talk: Getting Involved in Open Source

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We’re circling around on January again, which means it’s time for my annual talk at MHVLUG. One thing that’s really fascinated me over the last year is recovering and revitalizing open source projects whose maintainer has wandered off. The talk was mostly going to be about that, but after a bunch of conversations, I realized that I probably needed a talk of more broad appeal.

The new talk is going to be: Getting Involved in Open Source. This is going to be both a personal journey, as well as a list of lessons along the way. The successes and failures are going to be basically mine alone. After over a decade working in open source, I’ve got bumps and bruises all over the place, but fortunately no mortal wounds.

I’ve already got slides and talking points spinning in my head, things I haven’t thought about in years. This is going to be a really fun talk, and should be very educational to people with all levels of open source development.

New MHAA Website

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Over the past few weeks I’ve been redoing the Mid Hudson Astronomical Association website.  It looks like this:

Yes, it’s dark, but that’s when astronomy happens.  The site is built on Drupal, as I’ve gotten some experience there recently doing sites for the Poughkeepsie Farm Project and MHVLUG.  For people that want to know more about the tech side, I’ll be giving a talk in January at MHVLUG.

I did come across one really odd thing in working on the three boxes (I was calling them chicklets, but they look less like that with content in them). Round corners in CSS are awesome (thank you w3c). IE9, at least the version in Adobe Browser labs, still doesn’t support it (really Microsoft? I thought you were getting down with the standards). While a TD can have a round background, it’s border is always square (I almost understand why, but it definitely limits what you can do. It also took me a while to realize this was happening as the round is subtle enough on the front page). Div height 100% doesn’t work inside a TD (it seems like it should, but no one implemented it that way).

So the only way to get 3 columns that correctly degrade to 2 columns (50% of screen each) when one is missing (there will not always be a special event), have round borders, and be the same height is…. jquery. While on the one hand, it seems crazy, on the other hand, yay for jquery. You can view the source on the website to see how I did it.

Streaming talk on Git

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Tomorrow night (Wed, Jan 6th) at 6pm EST I’ll be presenting at MHVLUG on Git, the distributed source code management system.  New and notable on this talk is that I’ll be streaming the talk live on ustream, and, assuming the tech doesn’t horribly break down in the middle of it, will be taking questions from the viewers online as well.

For those software folks that read this blog, or the facebook / twitter posts it generates, this might be of interest to you.  Getting your head around merges in git takes some work early on, and with any luck the diagrams and explanations I pulled together with help quite a bit.

ACM talk tonight on Open Source development

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I’ll be giving the Poughkeepsie chapter ACM meeting tonight on Open Source development.  Some recent experiences with github have got me thinking on some of the new patterns emerging out of Open Source development.  The talk tonight is a first attempt at trying to show the emergence of these patterns.  While I’m not sure I’ve got all the right art or slides for that, I’ve got some really good notes, so I expect this will be a very fun and lively session.

If you are in the Poughkeepsie area tonight (Monday April 20th), you should stop by.

OSCON 2007 – Steve Yegge – How to Ignore Marketing and Become Irrelevant in Two Easy Steps.

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Steve Yegge’s OSCON 2007 keynote is up online now. It’s a great talk, even if the slides didn’t work during it. He also finally lets out what the Next Big Language is, which he’s been alluding to for a while in his blog.

I’m really glad this got posted online, as this was one of the talks at OSCON I really wish I’d been there for.