kentcowgill.org/blog

So, I finally decided to stop putting it off and upload the slides from my testing talk onto slideshare.net. Click here to view these slides, as well as any future slides I make public.

Unfortunately, this presentation/slide set was heavy with screencasts, which don't survive the transition to PDFs very well. I'm considering hosting the screencasts elsewhere.

Enjoy!

This one is even later. I guess it just goes to show you that I've been a little busy :)

One thing I forgot to mention: Monday night was the BBQ BoF - a disjointed group of 50 or so of us took separate rides to Goode's BBQ. A few of the disjointed travelers wound up at either Goode's Seafood, Goode's Taquieria, or Goode's Coral - they were separate buildings within a few blocks of each other, and I guess some of us (well, them, really) weren't so good at reading the address indicators on the street signs.

Tuesday was a good day. I attended Cathartic Catalytic Conversion in the morning, and then went to Abigail's Perl 5.10 regular expressions talk. Wow. There's some really cool stuff coming in the next Perl5 release.

I skipped the next section where my choices were the first part of the Perl 6 update, a web framework called Gantry (or Bigtop?), and Perl Logging Practices. I've seen the Logging practices talk locally in Chicago, a new web framework didn't really interest me, and I really wanted to see Luke Closs' Agile Testing with Selenium, which gave me a lot better idea of how to go about using selenium.

Next was Perrin Harkins' Care and Feeding of Large Web Applications. I stayed in that room for a talk I was interested in - Casey West's MochiKit: Good Tools for the Web Developer. Unfortunately, about 15 minutes into the talk, I got an IM from work and had to help out an issue remotely. Which pretty much took my time for the rest of the day, keeping me from seeing any more talks. But that was OK, because there weren't any talks competing for my attention.

The official evening was capped off by the YAPC Dinner and TPF Auction - but after that, a few of us got together for the Beers of the World BoF. We first gathered in the basement "common room" of Oberholtzer Hall, but we got busted by the RA's - no drinking in common areas. So the 40 or so of us that were there crammed into one dorm suite. Very crowded, and I think I'm still amazed that we didn't encounter further resistance to our 'partying' efforts from the university staff.

So, it's a little late, but here it is anyhow.

Yesterday was not only my birthday, but it was also the first day of YAPC::NA 2007 in Houston.

The day got off to a nice start with a really good talk by cog, AKA JoséCastro about how to get the most out of a YAPC. Not much was news to me, but there were a bunch of first-timers in the audience, so it was well received.

Then a traditional keynote by Larry, a morale building talk by Richard Dice, and lunch.

After lunch, I went to Approximation Algorithms in Perl by Walt Mankowski. It was nice overview of coming up with approximate solutions to N-complete problems - travelling salesman, bin packing - unfortunately it was a little short.

After that, I stuck around for Making an AjAX GUI for GNU Screen - which was really pretty cool - essentially running a mini local HTTP server to build an AJAX-ified front end for finding out which of your 10+ screen sessions has what you're looking for.

After the small break, I went to Updating Your Testing Toolbox which covered a few tools that I already make use of - FireBug (ok, really it's just one, but it has so many different useful components) - and introduced a few that I had heard of, but not gotten around to using, like selenium. I'm going to give it a shot - I've already downloaded it and played around with the IDE, but this really seems like it's going to be a great way to do some functional testing of the websites I work on.

Finally I attended Abuse Perl which showed a few ways to inject your code into code that you're trying to debug without touching the original code.

Monday night was Game Night and we had a great time playing pool, air hockey, and all sorts of video games.

All in all, a pretty good time.

So, I'm sitting here in the lobby for one of the dorms at the University of Houston.

I arrived around 1:30pm or so, got my luggage, arranged for a shuttle, but had no idea of the address. So I had to find the University of Houston on a map to try to figure out an address to tell the shuttle company.

Finally arrived on campus, but the shuttle van just dropped me off by the front of the University. Oh, and it was raining.

Wandered around a bit, got my bearing, checked a campus map or two, found the building I'm supposed to check in at, checked in, get to my cell - wait, I mean drom room - unpack, and then I'm bored.

No ethernet cable, so I figured I'd go back to the main lobby of the other dorm building, and meet R. Geoffrey Avery.

Not much else to do since there's just the two of us, and he's busy downloading Apple's Developer Tools.