presentations¶

iPads are just made for Screencasts

Killer app for iPads

Trying to justify getting yourself a new iPad3? My favourite use for my iPad lately has been watching quality screencasts by Gary Bernhardt (Destroy All Software) and Ryan Bates (RailsCasts). Each offer a premium subscription model where you pay $9 a month for access to their full catalog along with all new videos.

I've never really been into Screencasts but I've only recently discovered the secret seems to be in keeping them short. Here are two I've been really getting into.

Worth Paying For

How much do you earn each month from your craft? I wouldn't think twice about paying $9 a month to the individuals who create such valuable art. To be honest I think we're getting it cheap.

Destroy All Software

Gary Bernhardt has a communication style I can only describe it as "performance vim". You spend most of the ten or so minutes watching him make text dance in a full screen terminal. It's like pairing with someone you can really learn something from. The iPad is just the right size to make it work.

Destroy All Software Screencasts

RailsCasts

Ryan Bates has been producing short (5-12 minute) screencasts covering all manner of topics of interest to "Ruby People" for years now and making them available for free. Ryan makes his screencasts available via RSS which means they automatically find their way to my iPad.

Too many in our community give of themselves without making it easy enough for us to give back. I contacted Ryan a while back to ask how I could donate. I'm glad he has now made restructured things to make his ongoing work sustainable.

Ryan Bates has been producing quality RailsCasts for years now

Speed Matters

Last week I lucky enough to attend O'Reilly Velocity 2010. In the heart of Silicon Valley, 1200 geeks assembled to discuss how we can make the web faster. We listened to techies from Amazon, Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft, Firefox, Firebug, Chrome, and more talking about web performance and operations. The trip was worth it. Check out the videos.

Last night I had the opportunity to present a little of what I've learned about Web Performance to the Melbourne Ruby User Group. It's clear from feedback that we care about reducing page load times and most of us have used performance analysers like YSlow. Folks appreciated metrics from Google, Amazon and Wikia that show a small difference in page load time (100ms) affects sales, abandonment and conversions. This kind of thing helps us make a business case to employers and clients for speeding up the web.

Australia is a "special place" network wise. The insane cost of bandwidth and services means many of us choose cheap hosting in the U.S. even when the majority of our users are in Australia. This means choosing increasing latency from ~20ms to >200ms. Latency affects TCP performance even more than most of us would guess. I'm currently looking into just how big a difference this makes.

Which leads to the next question, where are the great VPS and DNS services in Aus? Suggestions appreciated!

View more presentations from mbailey.

Pretty Code Samples in Presentations

Today is deprec day (well, the start of a deprec long weekend actually!).

I started the day with some procrastination. I decided to learn how to make super awesome eyecandy ruby slides in Keynote. I love presentations that include code samples and want to be able to make mine look good with as little effort as possible.

First I installed a Textmate bundle called Copy as RTF that copies a selection to the clipboard while preserving syntax highlighting and optimizing font size for pasting into Keynote.

Then I found the ultimate pretty font (slides 14 + 15) but can't work out it is. I tried all the fonts on my MacBookPro to no avail. Then it occurred to me that I want a fixed width font to display code. And my Mac has only four of them: Monaco (which is the default for textmate), Courier, Courier new and Andale Mono.

So what font have they used?

update - I found the font! It's Sunday night and I decided to have another crack at matching the font. Adobe Reader lists the fonts used under 'Document Properties'. There's a Textmate page listing alternative fonts. Guess what? BitstreamVeraSans and DejaVuSans are listed in both the document properties and the list of free fonts! I installed both and I reckon the winner is DejaVuSans-mono (download).

I got my Apple MacBookPro using this font by copying it to /System/Library/Fonts.

update 2 I had a problem with CopyasRTF. When pasting onto a black background in Keynote, all white text is turned black. I managed to fix this by changing the default color_index to 45 (from 0) as shown below.

unless new_style[:color_index]
  new_style[:color_index] = 45
end