I told you: Presentations

When working with teams, I happen to explain over and over again what I think is a good presentation and what I think is a bad presentation. Now I post that wishful thinking of mine here, so that I can redirect everybody here who wants to know what I appreciate when putting together a presentation.

Mandatory: Title slide

The first slide must contain

  • the date of the presentation
  • the names of each presenter
  • the title / subtitle of the presentation

Mandatory: Slide numbers

I want slide numbers on every slide. If there are no slide numbers, people cannot take notes and refer to a particular slide afterwards.

Mandatory: PDF only

There is no way I accept a PowerPoint or Keynotes file when handing in the presentation to the customer. It has to be PDF. However, it is OK to use the Keynotes project to present the presentation, because the Mac OS PDF full screen view sucks.

Mandatory: Rounded corners

Yes, I could put this into “Nice-to-Have features”, but it is so little work and so much effect that I request it. Use black, rounded corners for your presentation. If you don’t know how to do that, take it as an opportunity to learn how to do that. Keynotes should be shipping with a rounded corners function :)

Mandatory: No animations

The presentation mustn’t have any animation.

Nice-to-Have: Backups

Everybody in the team carries the presentation on a USB stick. Even better: bring some print-outs to be sure.

It-depends: Dark / Light slide background

Guy Kawasaki made a stunning remark about why slides should have a dark background: Did you ever see the credits in the end of a movie on white background? At any rate, I recommend that you use a dark background (gray/black/blue) when the audience is sitting in a very small room and the screen is right in front of their eyes and they have to look at presentations all day long. In that case it is exhausting to look at a huge bright wall. If the presentation is a rather unique event of the day, you should use white background (easier to print as well). Check out the Apple Keynotes for good-looking dark background, they’re hard to make.

The Laptop…

  • doesn’t need to reboot for VGA output
  • has the monitors synchronized, so that the presentation will be on the one and only main monitor
  • doesn’t have any icons on the desktop (looks very unprofessional)
  • does have an unspectacular, neutral desktop wallpaper (preferably black)
  • was tested on the beamer BEFORE the presentation started
  • has NO other program open (like messenger, outlook) except the presentation
  • has REALLY NO other program running, that includes the screensaver!
  • is connected to the power or has a full battery

The Presenter…

  • does NOT introduce the next speaker. You just leave the stage when you said your part.
  • will have a remote control (if not, let the others take care of controlling the slides)
  • does NOT look at one person (e.g. professor) – look at all the people
  • has practiced his part at least 3 times in front of the mirror and hits his time limit exactly

The Others…

  • stand on the SAME side while not saying anything
  • give the presenter FULL attention and are completely silent
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AirPortClown: Simple MAC address spoof for Snow Leopard

So I found Ryans Automator to do this at iamthekiller but it was not 100% perfect, so I added some of JosteinB’s suggestions from his blog and out came an AppleScript Application called AirPortClown, which you can download here:

And it looks something like this:

The source code is of course included in the download. MacDaddyX didn’t work for me and aaspoof is Shareware.

Update: If you look though the comments you will see that there is still some development going on, this version up here is for OS X 10.6.3 but you can download the version for OS X 10.6.2 here. Make sure your Airport is turned on first when using the 10.6.3 version.

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XML Sitemap Generator for Rails

I realy like the way the Google (XML) Sitemaps Generator for WordPress handles the generation of my sitemaps and informs Google about the changes on my blog.

I was missing this in the Rails world for a long time, so I decided to build my own Rails plugin.

Here it is: “XML Sitemap Generator for Rails”

It’s just a quick implementation of all the functionality you need to let your Rails App generate a XML Sitemap and ping Google about the updates.
It’s not made to be scale more to give your small site the abillitiy to have a sitemap.

I’ll work on it in the future to make it easy to add some custom URL’s and maybe to have a version to scale…

Check it out on: GitHub
If you have any suggestions fork the project and send me a pull request.

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» funkensturm. | Blog

Etwas mehr Privacy bitte (pgp, gpgmail, snow leopard, google suggest)

Glimmerblocker ist meiner Meinung nach der Beste Adblocker. Zu bekommen auf: www.glimmerblocker.org

Damit kann man dann auch einfach Google suggest queries blocken (einfach hosts blocken, die “/complete/search” im path haben)

Endlich gibt es GPGMail auch für Snow Leopard.

Direkt download: http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/20215/GPGMail-1.2.1.mailbundle.zip

Hintergrund für die Beta: http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2136007&start=30&tstart=0

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(Snow) Leopard + Rails + Passenger + VirtualBox + Windows 7 and localhost

How do you test your Rails app in Internet Explorer? Crossover? Parallels? VMWare?

However, I use VirtualBox and Windows 7 and it turned out to work out of the box.

In your PassengerPrefPane just rename one of your applications to begin with “a”, so that it is alphabetically the FIRST entry! You can verify this by listing the contents of this directory:

/etc/apache2/passenger_pane_vhosts

The first one will be available on “localhost” in your Mac. That should be the application you would like to test in IE.

Now just boot up your Virtualbox with Windows 7 and hit 10.0.2.2 in the IE, and you will see that particular application.

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Imagemagick on Snow Leopard

This is what the world has been waiting for:

http://github.com/maddox/magick-installer/tree/master

Because AFTER THAT you can sudo gem install rmagick

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render_nested_form Helper

Die in Rails 2.3 eingeführten Nested Forms haben mir am Anfang sehr viele Kopfschmerzen bereitet und tun dies immer mal wieder.

Dank schorsch vom SalesKing muss ich mir um diese Dinge keine Sorgen mehr machen.
Sein render_nested_form Helper übernimmt alles und hat ein paar sehr nette Options.

# Options are:
# * <tt>:new</tt> - specify a certain number of new elements to be added to the form. Useful for displaying a few blank elements at the bottom.
# * <tt>:name</tt> - override the name of the association, both for the field names, and the name of the partial
# * <tt>:partial</tt> - specify the name of the partial in which the form is located.
# * <tt>:fields_for</tt> - specify additional options for the fields_for_associated call
# * <tt>:locals</tt> - specify additional variables to be passed along to the partial
# * <tt>:render</tt> - specify additional options to be passed along to the render :partial call
# * <tt>:skip</tt> - array of elements which will be skipped, usefull if you already rendered a partial in the same form with parts of the data. eg. obj.addresses, render the firt address on top of form, render all the other addresses at the bottom
 
f.render_nested_form(@project.tasks, :new => 3, :partial=>'some_partial', :locals=>..)

Update:
Ich hab den Helper geforked und die Option :as hinzugefügt. Damit kann man den Namen der lokalen Variable definieren, wenn man den Partial z.B. für unterschiedliche Objekte und Attribute nutzt (bei mir ist das ein Upload Form).
Hier findet ihr den Fork.

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Get HTTP Headers in Ruby

Ein kleiner Schnipsel, um nur den Header eines HTTP Aufrufes zu erhalten.

url = URI.parse('http://manuel.funkensturm.de/')
req = Net::HTTP::Get.new(url.path)
res = Net::HTTP.start(url.host, url.port) { |http| http.request_head('/feed/') }
res.to_yaml

Interessant sind in meinen Augen folgende Werte:

>> res['last-modified']
=> "Tue, 11 Aug 2009 16:09:01 GMT"
>> res['content-type']
=> "application/rss+xml; charset=\"UTF-8\""
>> res['etag']
=> "\"ca39ca8e3c9d3b858ef0d711956e00ad\""

über last-modified oder den etag kann man dann schauen, ob man den Feed abholt oder die Aktion durchführt…

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Funkenrailsdav: Webdav with Rails e.g. for ical

So you want a rails application to give you a webdav? Good, railsdav can do this for you. However, it might take you an hour or two as well to figure out how it works :)

This plugin is a copy of the original railsdav plugin with some modifications to make it run out-of-the-box. Just drop this plugin into your newly created rails application and it becomes a webdav-server. It comes with Authentication, so you can publish and synchronize your ical-files without fear :)

This was done using Rails 2.3.2.

Get it here: http://github.com/funkensturm/railsdav

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Presenting: The Funkengallery Demo App

Still in beta mode, but we are proud to present a Rails 2.3 application, modularized in plugins, fully I18n (German, English, Swedish), and of course published at github.

This funkengallery demo application includes demonstration of all our plugins:

  • acts_as_category
  • acts_as_identifiable
  • funkengallery
  • funkenlogin
  • funkenlogin
  • irobot
  • manipulify

Again, this is beta still, which means that for example the admin area wants your models to be called exactly “Category” and “User”. So not 100% modularized yet, but we’re getting there and you can already use it as a perfect standalone application ;)

What’s so special about this gallery is the very dynamic user rights management and the simplicity. It is designed for a complex category tree with many thousands of pictures. However, you might expect flickr design and you get… well… funkengallery. It is different and simpler, but really neat if you want to share your pictures quick, private and with individual user rights.

Screenshots and Demo

Check out our Downloads site to see how you can easily test your local demo.

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