To-do: Learn How to give a good presentation

I’m sure you’ve had to sit through a lot of presentations and even more lectures that were horribly boring. I think it is very irresponsible of a person giving a presentation to just read off the slides. And given the nature of things, it may be the case that someday, you’ll be that speaker. So please, although I’ve said this before a lot of times (if you’ve been reading my blog for the last few years, you’ll realize that this is true), I think it’s worth it to repeat this again, in a recipe format.

Step 1: Best software for presentations

You have to realize that creating a PowerPoint slide is just a waste of time if all you’re going to put on the slides is a bunch of text. Please, just print out a few pages of that text and hand it out before your talk. Using PowerPoint as speakers notes is a crime.

If you’ve convinced yourself that you’ll be showing some meaningful images and need some kind of a presentation software, here are some good picks:

• Keynote (mac only): Simple, easy to use and has some really fancy animations. Don’t get carried away by these fancy animations though!
• PowerPoint: The thing that everyone uses…
• S5: Present from a HTML page (and the tell people to view it on your website after the talk!)
• Google Docs: Create your presentation online (great for collaborative presentations!)
• SlideRocket: Another powerful online alternative that has Keynote style effects
• Beamer: If you need to give research talks that involve a lot of equations (and know what LaTeX is), then Beamer is something that you should look at

Step 2: Create your slides

Some rules:

• 10/20/30 rules: If you’re pitching something, I highly recommend Guy Kawasaki’s 10/20/30 rule. 10 slides, 20 minutes, and a minimum 30 pt font!
• More images than text… this’ll force you to know your presentation, not to read off the slides
• High resolution images
• A sensible theme (a dark blue background with white text doesn’t cut it anymore….). Please choose something that’s easy on the eyes.

Step 3: Rehearse, rinse and repeat

You can’t ever give a good talk without practicing. The more you practice, the more you’ll realize that the software is there mainly just to show a bunch of pictures. Having some text on the slide, and you reading it out is just useless and distracting!

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Fix broken dictionary app in Mac OS X Leopard

So, it seems like the Wikipedia update broke Apple's dictionary application, because some developer at Apple figured that they'd never update Wikipedia. If you change Wikipedia's MonoBook theme to something else, it stops working.

Nevertheless, there seems to be an easy fix for this (sort of). Here's what you can do for now (I think I read about this at smartassism a while ago, but I've tried to describe it a much simpler way here). The instructions pretty much tell you to revert to the older version of Wikipedia:

1. Go to wikipedia in Safari because Dictionary.app uses Safari to load Wikipedia
2. Log-in. If you've never done this before, you can create a new account by clicking Log-in/register at the top right of the page. While logging-in check the Remember me for 30 days box. This box will set a cookie in your computer, because you probably don't wan't to sign into wikipedia every time you want to use it from Dictionary.app.
3. Once you log-in click on My preferences at the top right again, and click the Appearance Tab
4. Set your skin to MonoBook and save your preferences
5. Restart Dictionary.app and Wikipedia, the most complete and reliable source known to mankind, will work perfectly again

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Psychotherapy with Emacs

What does a computer geek do when s/he has problems? Ask Doctor emacs.

Please, try it out for yourself (if you haven't ever opened emacs, try typing in emacs in a terminal window). Then press the Alt key and the x key (or M-x if you know what that means) and type in doctor.

Hello Dr. Emacs!

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