While doing backups of my important personal stuff (this website, my code, etc), I found some presentations I'd done in school:

• MPICH 101
• Hacking/Security 101
• RDF/Semantic Web

I also removed a pile of comments that were spam or people testing the comment system. Some comments had unicode characters in them causing python to barf (I have a python cgi script that helps me search/delete comments), but doing .encode("latin-1") fixed it.

There were only a few spams that got past my scripts. I might add word filtering to the pyblosxom comment plugin so crap mentioning viagra and cialis won't even be permitted. Still seeing these happily in my logs:

REJECT: Comment attempt by 193.203.99.31 rejected. Reason: expired secret, referer: http://www.semicomplete.com/blog/articles/week-of-unix-tools/day-1-sed.html
REJECT: Comment attempt by 78.110.175.18 rejected. Reason: javascript test failed (expiration ok), referer: http://www.semicomplete.com/projects/xdotool/

I found some time tonight to convert one of my slideshows to S5. It's not fully done, but I have a working slideshow. It took about 5 lines of xslt different from the presenter.xsl stylesheet to turn my slideshow stuff into S5. I still need to learn about S5, but it seems to have many of the features I want - have I mentioned this before? ;)

It's *much* slower than xmlpresenter when switching slides. I can move at many slides-per-second with xmlpresenter and it takes 1-2 seconds to switch slides with S5. However, I'm not sure 'slides-per-second' is even a meaningful metric worth considering. Who does multiples slides in a second anyway? Still, I'm concerned for the overall speed of the software if switching slides takes a while.

my vim presentation in s5: presentations/s5/vim.html

Thanks to Sean Graham for pointing out a few typos and suggestions on the vim slides. Fixed!

I've finally got some small free time, so hopefully I'll have something productive coming out of tonight.

Today was my 2nd open-to-campus seminar at RIT. This time it was on how to use Vim. I made pretty handouts and stuff.

Slides can be found here: /presentations/vim

I haven't updated the codebase available from the xmlpresenter project page in a while, but development still continues on it as I do more presentations.

Today's update was to add printability to the slides. This is done by using the media="print" part of the <link> tag.

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="screen,projection" href="presenter.css"/>

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="print" href="printview.css"/>

When you print, a different css will be applied than 'presenter.css' - very cool.

Specific changes are:

• all slides are shown
• slide titles use a smaller font, and lack borders
• slides with no titles are not printed

Useful, I suppose, if you want to print out your slides in "outline" form.

Check out the Unix Basics slides and look at it with "print preview" - Unix Basics slides

I gave a lecture on Unix basics this past friday in building 70. Attendance was about 20, which was far more than I expected. It was open to anyone who wanted to attend.

The slides can be found in the link below. They are html-based, and may require you to use a non-sucky browser to view them. I have not tested if browsers other than Firefox work, but I have heard that Opera and Safari choke on it. I'll fix that later.

Unix Basics slides

If you've never used my slide tool before, here's how:

• arrow keys (left/right) navigate back/forward
• spacebar goes forward
• 't' will toggle showing of the slide list.

Long-story-short: I wanted a web-based presentation system that was easy and fast. It took me a few hours to get it finished, but it's definatley at a 1.0 stage now. I'm going to add a few more cool features as time progresses, but don't hold your breath.

The project page has enough of a description of the project that I won't bother discussing it here. Clicky!

Link: XML Presenter