That English, No, Aussie, Accent

Mon, 31 Jul 2006 13:07:34 GMT

I don't know about you, but in the last five years, the technical presentations I've heard, some in person, most over podcasts, tend to be delivered by a guy with an accent, British, Australian, Russian, Hungarian, French, Indian, etc.

Well, the Create Passionate Users's Kathy Sierra noticed it too and listed the accent as one of the reasons Damian Conway's presentations are brilliant:

Kathy Sierra: So what's his secret?

I'll summarize a few points here, but for a deeper look, check out these blog notes someone took at Damian's Presentation Akido talk (teaching geeks to give presentations), which I haven't seen but hope to one day.

Damian is brilliant. One of those scary smart guys. So there's that.

And he's entertaining, has a wonderful voice, and that ~~English~~ (oops) Aussie accent.

I learned my English with a pretty standard (I was told) London accent. However I gave it all away after decades of living in the United States. Maybe I should pick that British accent up and start getting into the technical presentations fields.

Howdjewdo?

Slides, DocBook, PowerPoint Free, ...

Tue, 22 Jul 2003 03:43:23 GMT

Eleven days ago, I gave a presentation at the St. Louis Java Users Group. The topic was JBoss. And here's how I began: "In true Open Source fashion, I'm presenting today's talk on a laptop running Red Hat Linux 9.0 with the Mozilla web browser. The presentation is generated from an XML file based on the DocBook Slides DTD and trandformed to XHTML using Saxon and the DocBook Slides XSL stylesheets."

Here, for the curious, are the tools I used to author the presentation:

Emacs - A powerful text editor.
PSGML - A major mode for Emacs for editing SGML and XML files.
DocBook Slides - An XML DTD and a set of XSLT stylesheets for generating HTML based slides and XSL-FO files.
DocBook XSL stylesheets - Used by DocBook Slides.
Saxon - A Java based XSLT transformation processor with powerful extensions.
TeX - Donald Knuth's typesetting system, generates dvi, PostScript, and PDF files.
PassiveTeX - An XSL-FO to TeX translator.
xmltex - An XML parser written in TeX. Used by PassiveTeX during the XSL-FO to TeX translation.

The toolchain may sound complicated, but the mojority of the tools are already included with Red Hat Linux 9.0. I already installed Saxon and PSGML for other purposes. The only thing I have to install is the DocBook Slides.

DocBook contains 400 tags. For the presentation I used only 30 tags. Not too bad. Code samples are included verbatim in CDATA sections.

Because in DocBook it is easier to write paragraphs than make bullet lists, the slides are more conversational, and I imagine will be more useful for people who missed the presentation.

The HTML format also allowed me to link to various plain text files rather than having to include them in. This made me more active (and less boring) during the presentation.

All in all, I had a positive experience. I would do it this way the next time.

Oh, did I mention I did not use PowerPoint?

Weiqi Gao's Observations - presentation tag

That English, No, Aussie, Accent

Slides, DocBook, PowerPoint Free, ...