in reply to (OT) Presentations Involving Code

You might want to find out whether the machine in the lecture room will have internet access, and if so, perhaps it wouldn't be too ambitious to set up some sort of demo web site that will display some canned perl script(s) with instructive inputs and outputs. I guess if you're lecturing about a module that provides a wrapper for a commercial web-based API, having internet access would be really nice.

In the absence of that, I'm not sure where to go -- grab some screen shots and just present those as images?

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Re^2: (OT) Presenations Involving Code
by Corion (Patriarch) on Mar 07, 2007 at 17:55 UTC

    In my experience, never ever make internet access essential to any presentation. Ideally, the complete presentation is self-contained and doesn't need anything beyond the presentation program to be installed in the default manner. Relying on an internet connection or an (unknown) Perl installation is just asking for trouble if you can't test it beforehand.

    I always have a static backup when doing live demos, because live demos are prone to failure. Displaying screenshots that do the "walk through" through the live demo is almost as good, and is a safe-way fallback. If you can't do it with screenshots, consider doing it as a video but consider what kind of codec you use to encode the screencast video.

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      In my experience, never ever make internet access essential to any presentation. Ideally, the complete presentation is self-contained and doesn't need anything beyond the presentation program to be installed in the default manner. Relying on an internet connection or an (unknown) Perl installation is just asking for trouble if you can't test it beforehand.

      In the past, when overhead projectors were available, I would also make overhead slides. My basic rule of thumb is to assume that anything under your control may fail and anything not under your control will fail. Ensure that you have fallbacks almost up to the rediculous. Only you can decide what the rediculous is :)

      --MidLifeXis

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Re^2: (OT) Presenations Involving Code
by derby (Abbot) on Mar 07, 2007 at 17:57 UTC

    Or even access for a USB keychain ... it's amazing what you can fit on those things these days.

    -derby
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      Or burn your own Ubuntu (or knoppix, or insert your favourite OS here . . . ) distro onto a livecd and boot your whole demo environment off that on their equipment.

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        And when the presentation equipment is a Mac? Having something normal is nice to deal with strangeness like that.

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