I’ve been contracting for four years and added a former colleague as a subcontractor to my contract for the past year: is that the sort of thing you are advising to “get out of” quickly or being a subcontractor yourself?

At risk of committing the eternal developer fallacy of attempting to fix cultural problems with technology: is there anything we, as a hacker community, can do to help?

As brother to a profoundly deaf sister (whose nerve-deafness and age make her ineligible for the cochlea implant), the most obvious opportunity is the poor accessibility of online video as you mentioned under "Screencasts, talks, and video tutorials". It seems that YouTube is making great progress in this area (c.f. http://www.youtube.com/t/captions_about and the simplicity of the transcript format at http://support.google.com/youtube/bin/answer.py?hl=en&an...); is it just a case of contributing more transcripts and bringing this functionality to all video?

I vaguely remember some other efforts in this area, it'd be great if there was some painless way to transcribe arbitrary video (such as screencasts) and be able to wrap a player with caption support.

The presentation from which this article is adapted was a definite highlight of the Ru3y Manor conference (and received rapturous applause).

I highly recommend watching the video of the original presentation at http://rubymanor.org/3/videos/programming_with_nothing/ as Tom Stuart's public speaking skills made this a thoroughly enjoyable (if a little mind-bending) talk.

Tom’s talk blew my mind. Can't recommend watching this enough.

I agree. This is presentation was brilliant and I'd really encourage people to watch it.

You can tell Bundler to install to a relative path by default by putting the following in ~/.bundle/config:

  ---
  BUNDLE_PATH: vendor/bundle

In that way, you need only run the standard "bundle" or "bundle install" instead of setting up an alias.

This is a fair criticism: I've now updated the examples so they don't involve method_missing so as to not needlessly complicate the issue.

Oh! I didn't mean to insult you or the blog post, I liked it very much, I meant in production code or open source projects. Your blog post was very straightforward and interesting.

You're right, enomar; I've updated the post to reflect Google's recommended placement of the asynchronous snippet (and your other comment regarding the script type attribute only defaulting in HTML5).

Perhaps instead of appending to document.body, it would be better to use document.documentElement.firstChild to use the head element instead (this is what is present on http://diveintomark.org).

As mentioned in the article, Edward Tufte has a similar opinion of PowerPoint's approach to presentations which he wrote about at length in "The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint: Pitching Out Corrupts Within" http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/books_pp - a sample of which can be read here: http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0...

What is particularly difficult about this issue is that I have recently enjoyed reviewing slides from talks at RubyConf but am also aware that the most detailed slides may well have accompanied the worst presentations. I'm thinking particularly of talks that amount to nothing more than a speaker reading out their slides which sometimes cause me to wonder: "what value is being added by the speaker actually being here if I could just read this content in my own time?"

I suppose -- as other commenters have mentioned -- there are two audiences for slides:

* People who saw the presentation and want reference material;

* People who haven't seen the presentation and wish to substitute attendance with the slides alone.

Only the former audience is well served by conference organisers blindly demanding slides, the latter lack the context of the talk itself. What would be better is if some more complete version of a presentation was available (video, transcript, etc.) but this isn't always possible or permitted. The danger is that the easier option -- just providing slides -- actually miscommunicates the quality or intention of the presentation for those who weren't in attendance.

Regarding slides as reference material, I've given several tech presentations at my job, and since I have to make the presentation available afterwards, I usually include slides that make the slide deck independently more useful (either interleaved or at the end) but I don't show them during the talk. I use Apple's Keynote in presenter mode, which makes skipping over slides very seamless to the audience.

For live tech demos, I've never not had some little screw up either, so if time permits, I usually make a screencast as a backup and provide that with the slides. It's time intensive and I've often donated a lot of personal time to it, but a good presentation makes a huge difference in the support you receive.