The Universe of Disco

A better way to do remote presentations

A few months ago I wrote an article about a strategy I had tried when giving a talk via videochat. Typically:

The slides are presented by displaying them on the speaker's screen, and then sharing the screen image to the audience.

I thought I had done it a better way:

I published the slides on my website ahead of time, and sent the link to the attendees. They had the option to follow along on the web site, or to download a copy and follow along in their own local copy.

This, I thought, had several advantages:

1. Each audience person can adjust the monitor size, font size, colors to suit their own viewing preferences.

2. The audience can see the speaker. Instead of using my outgoing video feed to share the slides, I could share my face as I spoke.

3. With the slides under their control, audience members can go back to refer to earlier material, or skip ahead if they want.

When I brought this up with my co-workers, some of them had a very good objection:

I am too lazy to keep clicking through slides as the talk progresses. I just want to sit back and have it do all the work.

Fair enough! I have done this.

If you package your slides with page-turner, one instance becomes the “leader” and the rest are “followers”. Whenever the leader moves from one slide to the next, a very simple backend server is notified. The followers periodically contact the server to find out what slide they are supposed to be showing, and update themselves accordingly. The person watching the show can sit back and let it do all the work.

But! If an audience member wants to skip ahead, or go back, that works too. They can use the arrow keys on their keyboard. Their follower instance will stop synchronizing with the leader's slide. Instead, it will display a box in the corner of the page, next to the current slide's page number, that says what slide the leader is looking at. The number in this box updates dynamically, so the audience person always knows how far ahead or behind they are.

Synchronized	Unsynchronized

At left, the leader is displaying slide 3, and the follower is there also. When the leader moves on to slide 4, the follower instance will switch automatically.

At right, the follower is still looking at slide 3, but is detached from the leader, who has moved on to slide 007, as you can see in the gray box.

When the audience member has finished their excursion, they can click the gray box and their own instance will immediately resynchronize with the leader and follow along until the next time they want to depart.

I used this to give a talk to the Charlotte Perl Mongers last week and it worked. Responses were generally positive even though the UI is a little bit rough-looking.

Technical details

The back end is a tiny server, written in Python 3 with Flask. The server is really tiny, only about 60 lines of code. It has only two endpoints: for getting the leader's current page, and for setting it. Setting requires a password.

    @app.route('/get-page')
    def get_page():
        return { "page": app.server.get_pageName() }

    @app.route('/set-page', methods=['POST'])
    def set_page():
        …
        password = request.data["password"]
        page = request.data["page"]
        try:
            app.server.update_pageName(page, password)
        except WrongPassword:
            return failure("Incorrect password"), status.HTTP_401_UNAUTHORIZED

        return { "success": True }

The front end runs in the browser. The user downloads the front-end script, pageturner.js, from the same place they are getting the slides. Each slide contains, in its head element:

    <LINK REL='next'     HREF='slide003.html' TYPE='text/html; charset=utf-8'>
    <LINK REL='previous' HREF='slide001.html' TYPE='text/html; charset=utf-8'>
    <LINK REL='this'     HREF='slide002.html' TYPE='text/html; charset=utf-8'>

    <script language="javascript" src="pageturner.js" >
    </script>

The link elements tell page-turner where to go when someone uses the arrow keys. (This could, of course, be a simple counter, if your slides are simply numbered, but my slide decks often have slide002a.html and the like.) Most of page-turner's code is in pageturner.js, which is a couple hundred lines of JavaScript.

On page switching, a tiny amount of information is stored in the browser window's sessionStorage object. This is so that after the new page is loaded, the program can remember whether it is supposed to be synchronized.

If you want page-turner to display the leader's slide number when the follower is desynchronized, as in the example above, you include an element with class phantom_number. The phantom_click handler resynchronizes the follower:

    <b onclick="phantom_click()"  class="phantom_number"></b>

The password for the set-page endpoint is embedded in the pageturner.js file. Normally, this is null, which means that the instance is a follower. If the password is null, page-turner won't try to update set-page. If you want to be the leader, you change

   "password": null,

to

   "password": "swordfish",

or whatever.

Many improvements are certainly possible. It could definitely look a lot better, but I leave that to someone who has interest and aptitude in design.

I know of one serious bug: at present the server doesn't handle SSL, so must be run at an http://… address; if the slides reside at an https://… location, the browser will refuse to make the AJAX requests. This shouldn't be hard to fix.

Source code download

page-turner

Patches welcome.

License

The software is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license (CC BY 4.0).

You are free to share (copy and redistribute the software in any medium or format) and adapt (remix, transform, and build upon the material) for any purpose, even commercially, so long as you give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use.

Share and enjoy.

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A maxim for conference speakers

The only thing worse than re-writing your talk the night before is writing your talk the night before.

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Screensharing your talk slides is skeuomorphic

Back when the Web was much newer, and people hadn't really figured it out yet, there was an attempt to bring a dictionary to the web. Like a paper dictionary, its text was set in a barely-readable tiny font, and there were page breaks in arbitrary places. That is a skeuomorph: it's an incidental feature of an object that persists even in a new medium where the incidental feature no longer makes sense.

Anyway, I was scheduled to give a talk to the local Linux user group last week, and because of current conditions we tried doing it as a videoconference. I thought this went well!

We used Jitsi Meet, which I thought worked quite well, and which I recommend.

The usual procedure is for the speaker to have some sort of presentation materials, anachronistically called “slides”, which they display one at a time to the audience. In the Victorian age these were glass plates, and the image was projected on a screen with a slide projector. Later developments replaced the glass with celluloid or other transparent plastic, and then with digital projectors. In videoconferences, the slides are presented by displaying them on the speaker's screen, and then sharing the screen image to the audience.

This last development is skeuomorphic. When the audience is together in a big room, it might make sense to project the slide images on a shared screen. But when everyone is looking at the talk on their own separate screen anyway, why make them all use the exact same copy?

Instead, I published the slides on my website ahead of time, and sent the link to the attendees. They had the option to follow along on the web site, or to download a copy and follow along in their own local copy.

This has several advantages:

1. Each audience person can adjust the monitor size, font size, colors to suit their own viewing preferences.

   With the screenshare, everyone is stuck with whatever I have chosen. If my font is too small for one person to read, they are out of luck.

2. The audience can see the speaker. Instead of using my outgoing video feed to share the slides, I could share my face as I spoke. I'm not sure how common this is, but I hate attending lectures given by disembodied voices. And I hate even more being the disembodied voice. Giving a talk to people I can't see is creepy. My one condition to the Linux people was that I had to be able to see at least part of the audience.

3. With the slides under their control, audience members can go back to refer to earlier material, or skip ahead if they want. Haven't you had the experience of having the presenter skip ahead to the next slide before you had finished reading the one you were looking at? With this technique, that can't happen.

Some co-workers suggested the drawback that it might be annoying to try to stay synchronized with the speaker. It didn't take me long to get in the habit of saying “Next slide, #18” or whatever as I moved through the talk. If you try this, be sure to put numbers on the slides! (This is a good practice anyway, I have found.) I don't know if my audience found it annoying.

The whole idea only works if you can be sure that everyone will have suitable display software for your presentation materials. If you require WalSoft AwesomePresent version 18.3, it will be a problem. But for the past 25 years I have made my presentation materials in HTML, so this wasn't an issue.

If you're giving a talk over videoconference, consider trying this technique.

[ Addendum: I should write an article about all the many ways in which the HTML has been a good choice. ]

[ Addendum 20201102: I implemented a little software system, page-turner, that addresses my co-workers’ objections that it might be annoying to try to stay synchronized with the speaker. The little system automatically keeps the pages synchronized with the presenter, except when attendee doesn't want that. I wrote a followup blog post about page-turner. ]

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My Favorite NP-Complete Problem at !!Con 2016

Back in 2006 when this blog was new I observed that the problem of planning Elmo’s World video releases was NP-complete.

This spring I turned the post into a talk, which I gave at !!Con 2016 last week.

Talk materials are online.

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PIGS in SPACE!!!
Today I was at the Pittsburgh Perl Workshop and I gave a talk because that's my favorite part of a workshop, getting to give a talk.

The talk is about Moonpig, the billing system that Rik Signes and I wrote in Perl. Actually it's about Moonpig as little as possible because I didn't think the audience would be interested in the details of the billing system. (They are very interesting, and someone who is actually interested in a billing system, or in a case study of a medium-sized software system, would enjoy a three-hour talk about the financial architecture of Moonpig. But I wasn't sure that person would be at the workshop.) Instead the talk is mostly about the interesting technical underpinnings of Moonpig. Here's the description:

Moonpig is an innovative billing and accounting system that Rik Signes and I worked on between 2010 and 2012, totaling about twenty thousand lines of Perl. It was a success, and that is because Rik and I made a number of very smart decisions along the way, many of which weren't obviously smart at the time.

You don't want to hear about the billing and accounting end of Moonpig, so I will discuss that as little as possible, to establish a context for the clever technical designs we made. The rest of the talk is organized as a series of horrible problems and how we avoided, parried, or mitigated them:

• Times and time zones suck
• Floating-point arithmetic sucks
• It sucks to fix your mangled data after an automated process fails
• Testing a yearlong sequence of events sucks
• It sucks to have your automated test accidentally send a bunch of bogus invoices to the customers
• Rounding errors suck
• Relational databases usually suck
• Modeling objects in the RDB really really sucks
• Perl's garbage collection sucks
• OO inheritance sucks

Moonpig, however, does not suck.

Some of the things I'll talk about will include the design of our web API server and how it played an integral role in the system, our testing strategies, and our idiotically simple (but not simply idiotic) persistent storage solution. An extended digression on our pervasive use of Moose roles will be deferred to the lightning talks session on Sunday.

Much of the design is reusable, and is encapsulated in modules that have been released to CPAN or that are available on GitHub, or both.

Slides are available here. Video may be forthcoming.

Share and enjoy.

[ Addendum 20131217: I wrote up the talk contents in detail and posted them here. ]

[ Addendum 20131217: The video of the talk is available on YouTube, and has been since October, but I forgot to mention it. Unfortunately, the sound quality is poor; I tend to wander around a lot when I talk, and that confuses the microphone. Many thanks to Dan Wright for the video and especially for putting on PPW. ]

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Atypical Typing
I just got back from Nashville, Tennessee, where I delivered a talk at OOPSLA 2008, my first talk as an "invited speaker". This post is a bunch of highly miscellaneous notes about the talk.

If you want to skip the notes and just read the talk, here it is.

Talk abstract

Many of the shortcomings of Java's type system were addressed by the addition of generics to Java 5.0. Java's generic types are a direct outgrowth of research into strong type systems in languages like SML and Haskell. But the powerful, expressive type systems of research languages like Haskell are capable of feats that exceed the dreams of programmers familiar only with mainstream languages.

In this talk I'll give a brief retrospective on the history of type systems and an introduction to the type system of the Haskell language, including a remarkable example where the Haskell type checker diagnoses an infinite loop bug at compile time.

In 1999, the claim that strong typing does not have to suck was surprising news, and particularly so to Perl Mongers. In 2008, however, this argument has been settled by Java 5, whose type system demonstrates pretty conclusively that strong typing doesn't have to suck. I am not saying that you must like it, and I am not saying that there is no room for improvement. Indeed, it's obvious that the Java 5 type system has room for improvement: if you take the SML type system of 15 years ago, and whack on it with a hammer until it's chipped and dinged all over, you get the Java 5 type system; the SML type system of the early 1990s is ipso facto an improvement. But that type system didn't suck, and neither does Java's.

So I took out the arguments about how static typing didn't have to suck, figuring that most of the OOPSLA audience was already sold on this point, and took a rather different theme: "Look, this ivory-tower geekery turned out to be important and useful, and its current incarnation may turn out to be important and useful in the same way and for the same reasons."

In 1999, I talked about Hindley-Milner type systems, and although it was far from clear at the time that mainstream languages would follow the path blazed by the HM languages, that was exactly what happened. So the HM languages, and Haskell in particular, contained some features of interest, and, had you known then how things would turn out, would have been worth looking at. But Haskell has continued to evolve, and perhaps it still is worth looking at.

Or maybe another way to put it: If the adoption of functional programming ideas into the mainstream took you by surprise, fair enough, because sometimes these things work out and sometimes they don't, and sometimes they get adopted and sometimes they don't. But if it happens again and takes you by surprise again, you're going to look like a dumbass. So start paying attention!

Haskell types are hard to explain

It is a lot easier to explain ML's type system than it is to explain Haskell's. Partly it's because ML is simpler to begin with, but also it's because Haskell is so general and powerful that there are very few simple examples! For example, in SML one can demonstrate:

        (* SML *)
        val 3 : int;
        val 3.5 : real;

But in Haskell, 3 has the type (Num t) ⇒ t, and 3.5 has the type (Fractional t) ⇒ t. So you can't explain the types of literal numeric constants without first getting into type classes.

The benefit of this, of course, is that you can write 3 + 3.5 in Haskell, and it does the right thing, whereas in ML you get a type error. But it sure does make it a devil to explain.

Similarly, in SML you can demonstrate some simple monomorphic functions:

	  not : bool → bool
	 real : int → real
	 sqrt : real → real
	floor : real → int

            not :: Bool → Bool
    fromInteger :: (Num a) ⇒ Integer → a    -- analogous to 'real'
           sqrt :: (Floating a) ⇒ a → a
          floor :: (RealFrac a, Integral b) ⇒ a → b

Slides

Conference plenary sessions

On the other hand...

McCarthy didn't actually make it, unfortunately. But I did get to meet Richard Gabriel and Gregor Kiczales. And Daniel Weinreb, although I didn't know who he was before I met him. But now I'm glad I met Daniel Weinreb. During my talk I digressed to say that anyone who is appalled by Perl's regular expression syntax should take a look at Common Lisp's format feature, which is even more appalling, in much the same way. And Weinreb, who had been sitting in the front row and taking copious notes, announced "I wrote format!".

More explaining of jokes

One joke, however, is too amusing to leave out. At the start of the talk, I pretended to have forgotten my slides. "No problem," I said. "All my talks these days are generated automatically by the computer anyway. I'll just rebuild it from scratch." I then displayed this form, which initialliy looked like this:

Wadler's anecdote

I had never been to OOPSLA, so I also asked Wadler what the OOPSLA people would want to hear about. He mentioned STM, but since I don't know anything about STM I didn't say anything about it.

View it online

[ Addendum 20081031: Thanks to a Max Rabkin for pointing out that Haskell's analogue of real is fromInteger. I don't know why this didn't occur to me, since I mentioned it in the talk. Oh well. ]

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Conference talk brochure descriptions
I just got back from doing some tutorials at OSCON, which were generally well-received. Sometimes it goes better than other times; this time it went pretty well, I thought, except that I was seven minutes late to the Tuesday morning one, through a tremendous series of fuckups beginning with the conference hotel not being able to find my reservation on Saturday night, continuing with my barely missing two unrelated streetcars on Tuesday morning, and, let's not leave out the most important part, my forgetting that the class started at 8:30 and not at 9:00 until about 8:00.

I've written before about the general worthlessness of the attendee evaluations, so maybe I won't go into detail about them again. What I want to complain about here is the descriptions of the classes that appear in the conference brochure and on the web site.

One of the things that Nat (the program committee chair) and I have commiserated about in the past is that no matter how hard you try to make a clear, concise, accurate description of the class, you are doomed, because people do not use the descriptions in a rational way. For example, suppose I happen to be giving the same class two years in a row. The class title is the same both years. The 250-word description in the brochure and on the web site is word-for-word identical both years. Nevertheless, you can be sure that someone will hand in an evaluation the second year that complains bitterly that the class was a waste of time, because they took the class the year before and there was no new material. I vented about this to Nat once, and the look of exhausted disgust on his face was something to see. Because I only have to read my own stupid evaluations, but Nat has to read all the stupid evaluations, and he probably sees that same idiotic complaint ten times a year.

Here's one I was afraid I'd get this year, and, who knows. It may yet happen. I sent the program committee seven proposals. They accepted three. One was for the Advanced techniques for Parsing class; one for for Higher-Order Perl. There was significant overlap between these two classes; the last third of the Higher-Order Perl class is about higher-order parser combinators, which are the principal subject of the advanced parsing class. This puts me in a difficult position. The program committee has accepted two classes that overlap. I have to deliver the material that I promised in the brochure, which people paid money to hear. I cannot unilaterally eliminate the overlap, say by substituting a different topic into Higher-Order Perl, because then someone in that class might quite rightly complain that they had been promised a section on parsing techniques, had paid for a section on parsing techniques, but had not been delivered a section on parsing techniques. But some people will sign up for both classes, and then will inevitably complain about the overlap, even though it should have been clear from the brochure that the classes would overlap.

The only way out for me is to try to get the program committee to agree beforehand to let me change around one of the classes to remove the overlap, write one-third of a new class, and document the change in the brochure description before it is published. That is a lot of work to do in a short time. Some people write their class slides the night before they give the class. I don't; I take weeks over it, revising extensively, and then I give a practice session, and then I revise again. So the classes overlapped, and I'm sure there were complaints about it that I haven't seen yet.

My favorite complaint of all time was from the guy who took Tricks of the Wizards and then complained that the material was too advanced.

This year I had the opposite problem. I gave a class on Advanced techniques for Parsing, and the following day I read a blog article from someone who had been disappointed that it was insufficiently advanced. This is a fair and legitimate criticism, and deserves a reasonable response. The response is not, however, to change the class content, because I think I have a pretty good idea of how sophisticated the conference attendees are, and of what is useful, and if I made the class a lot more advanced than it is, hardly anyone would understand it. But I did feel bad that this blogger had mistakenly wasted hours in my class and gotten nothing out of it. That should have been avoidable.

The first thing I did was to check the brochure description, to see if perhaps it was misleading, or if it promised extra-advanced material that I then didn't deliver. This sometimes happens. The deadline for proposals is far in advance of the deadline for the class materials themselves. So what happens is that you write up a proposal for a class you think you can do, that people will like, and that will appeal to the program committee, and you send it in. A few months later, it is accepted, and you start work on the class. Then sometimes you discover that even though you proposed a class about A, B, and C, there is only enough time to do A and B properly, and to cover all three in a three-hour class would just be a mess. So you write a class that covers A and B properly, and has an abbreviated discussion of C. But then there will be some people who came to the class specifically for the discussion of C, and who are disappointed. It is a tough problem.

Anyway, I thought this time I had done a reasonably good job of writing a class that actually matched the brochure description. So I wrote to the blogger to ask how the description could have been better: what would I have needed to say in it that would have tipped him off that the class would not have had whatever it was he was looking for?

The answer: nothing. He had not read the description. He attended the class solely because of the title, Advanced techniques for Parsing, and then after two hours figured out that it was not as advanced as he wanted it to be.

Not my fault! Not my fault!

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