From: Xavier Noria <fxn@...>
Date: 2005-08-05T06:50:06+09:00
Subject: Re: FOSCON Photos

On Aug 4, 2005, at 23:16, Phil Tomson wrote:

> 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