FOSCON Photos

[Phil Tomson]

Last night in Portland we had a very good turnout for FOSCON (the Free
Open Source Convention). Speakers included:
- David Heinemeier Hansson (Rails)
- Rich Kilmer (Flash integration with Rails)
- Glenn Vanderburg (Ruby and MetaProgramming)
- Why the lucky stiff (Music, shadow puppets, audience participation
via drb, Rubyfun, animated Least Surprised)

Why's performance is hard to describe. Suffice it to say he had us all
in stitches. I think he's really on to something with this drb/irb
audience participation thing. At a greedier venue patents would be
filed. This will no doubt set the trend in interactive presentations for
years to come. Perhaps the end of PowerPoint is near. The age of
mixed-media drb-enabled shadow puppets is here.

Pictures can be found here:
http://flickr.com/photos/tags/foscon/

A small writeup and another picture (the one in the center) can be found
here:
http://rubyurl.com/VhbaO

Phil

 

[Jim Freeze]

=20
Last night in Portland we had a very good turnout for FOSCON (the Free
Open Source Convention). Speakers included:
- Why the lucky stiff (Music, shadow puppets, audience participation
via drb, Rubyfun, animated Least Surprised)
=20
Why's performance is hard to describe. Suffice it to say he had us all
in stitches. I think he's really on to something with this drb/irb
audience participation thing. At a greedier venue patents would be
filed. This will no doubt set the trend in interactive presentations for
years to come. Perhaps the end of PowerPoint is near. The age of
mixed-media drb-enabled shadow puppets is here.

Please describe more about this drb/irb.

--=20
Jim Freeze

 

[Phil Tomson]

Please describe more about this drb/irb.

He had people fire up irb and then displayed some code they would need to
log into his drb server running on his laptop. As each person logged in
the colors on the projected screen changed and it would divide into
different regions so you could tell how many people were logged in.
Audience members could
change colors on Why's display by changine their code in irb. It was
very cool... though some wise guy changed part of the screen to
white-on-white which made it impossible to
read the code on that section (but Why got some jokes out of this too).
Why's talk was extremely funny so it can be easy to overlook the fact
that this was a very innovative idea for creating an interactive
presentation. Most presentations are all one-sided: A speaker delivers
some information to an audience - there may be a Q&A session afterwards,
but other than that it's not interactive at all. What Why did last
night, I've not seen before: He invited the audience to directly
participate and even effect his presentation. This aspect deserves a lot
more examination.

One can imagine variations on this theme: For example you could run a
webrick server on your laptop and allow audience members to interact with
(and potentially effect) your presentation through their browsers. Lots
of potential uses: audience voting in real time, for example. Code
contests with the audience. It's great for tutorials (This is how Why
used it): you get people to actually try out the code you're talking
about with some kind of feedback to the speaker. Nobody gets bored.

I think that Ruby historians and sociologists will look at this
event as a seminal development in the direction of interactive teaching.
Oh, and two shadow puppet birds debated teaching methodologies just
prior to this part of the show - that was no accident.


Phil

 

[Jim Freeze]

Cool.

Did _why release his interactive drb/irb code?

=20
He had people fire up irb and then displayed some code they would need to
log into his drb server running on his laptop. As each person logged in
the colors on the projected screen changed and it would divide into
different regions so you could tell how many people were logged in.
Audience members could
change colors on Why's display by changine their code in irb. It was
very cool... though some wise guy changed part of the screen to
white-on-white which made it impossible to
read the code on that section (but Why got some jokes out of this too).
Why's talk was extremely funny so it can be easy to overlook the fact
that this was a very innovative idea for creating an interactive
presentation. Most presentations are all one-sided: A speaker delivers
some information to an audience - there may be a Q&A session afterwards,
but other than that it's not interactive at all. What Why did last
night, I've not seen before: He invited the audience to directly
participate and even effect his presentation. This aspect deserves a lot
more examination.
=20
One can imagine variations on this theme: For example you could run a
webrick server on your laptop and allow audience members to interact with
(and potentially effect) your presentation through their browsers. Lots
of potential uses: audience voting in real time, for example. Code
contests with the audience. It's great for tutorials (This is how Why
used it): you get people to actually try out the code you're talking
about with some kind of feedback to the speaker. Nobody gets bored.
=20
I think that Ruby historians and sociologists will look at this
event as a seminal development in the direction of interactive teaching.
Oh, and two shadow puppet birds debated teaching methodologies just
prior to this part of the show - that was no accident.
=20
=20
Phil
=20
=20

--=20
Jim Freeze

 

[Xavier Noria]

One can imagine variations on this theme: For example you could run a
webrick server on your laptop and allow audience members to
interact with
(and potentially effect) your presentation through their browsers.
Lots
of potential uses: audience voting in real time, for example. Code
contests with the audience. It's great for tutorials (This is how Why
used it): you get people to actually try out the code you're talking
about with some kind of feedback to the speaker. Nobody gets bored.

Cool! That's really cool.

Slides in my Perl classes have sample code that is executed in
presentation-time. Their stdout is added below the listing. This is a
static snapshot for example:

http://zeus.maia.ub.es/~fxn/cursos/lds/2004-2005/apunts/slide14.html

Being able to play around with the examples in situ makes the class
far more dynamic, I copied the idea from a PHP tutorial Rasmus Lerdof
gave in Madrid some years ago.

That's a Perl prototype with facilities for trivially including those
snippets and telling the CGI about arguments etc so that everything
is automatic. I have been using it for a few years and plan to write
as a themable framework with Ajax etc. I wanted to use Ruby for the
rewriting but the lack of a portable IO.popen(ARRAY) to avoid the
shell makes it risky for a public program, so I'll probably use
Python 2.4 (subprocess) or Java 1.5 (ProcessBuilder) :-(.

-- fxn

 

[Ezra Zygmuntowicz]

Last night in Portland we had a very good turnout for FOSCON (the Free
Open Source Convention). Speakers included:
- David Heinemeier Hansson (Rails)
- Rich Kilmer (Flash integration with Rails)
- Glenn Vanderburg (Ruby and MetaProgramming)
- Why the lucky stiff (Music, shadow puppets, audience participation
via drb, Rubyfun, animated Least Surprised)

Why's performance is hard to describe. Suffice it to say he had us
all
in stitches. I think he's really on to something with this drb/irb
audience participation thing. At a greedier venue patents would be
filed. This will no doubt set the trend in interactive
presentations for
years to come. Perhaps the end of PowerPoint is near. The age of
mixed-media drb-enabled shadow puppets is here.

Pictures can be found here:
http://flickr.com/photos/tags/foscon/

A small writeup and another picture (the one in the center) can be
found
here:
http://rubyurl.com/VhbaO

Phil

Yes _why's presentation was _very_ original I loved it! Modulaise!
-Ezra Zygmuntowicz
WebMaster
Yakima Herald-Republic Newspaper
(e-mail address removed)
509-577-7732