Creating a presentation with LaTeX and powerdot
A few days ago, I gave a talk at PHP London about using OAuth with PHP. I started out building it in OpenOffice, but quickly found the process annoying, especially considering that I wanted to export to PDF with progressive disclosure on some slides. After putting the skeleton of the talk together, I decided to move to something else instead.
I've had some experience with the LaTeX document typesetting system before, having used it quite a lot during university for my final project's reports and presentation. I used the beamer package before, but this time I found its styles too restrictive. The three major presentation packages that I'm aware of are prosper (which I believe is quite old now), beamer, and powerdot. After some investigation (looking primarily at features and visual styles), I settled for powerdot. I will explain the basics of putting a presentation together in the rest of this post, but be warned: it assumes some basic familiarity with LaTeX, and I don't explain everything!
Recovering from pvmove failure
Note: This is a fairly rambling explanation of recent events. I assume that you have at least a passing knowledge of LVM and its terminology. This was written to prove that it is possible to recover from pvmove failing (in certain cases) due to the way it performs its operations and backs up metadata.
mod_sqltemplate: A distraction from work
I've begun the long and (hopefully) interesting task of working on mod_sqltemplate. I have not yet found a tutorial or guide to working with APR's DBD API (the database abstraction layer for the Apache Portable Runtime), so I'll write one and publish it here as I go along...