This came in on gnome-press-contacts. Anyone interested in going to India?
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- From: "Dan Maharry" <dm_wroxindia satyam net in>
- To: <gnome-press-contact gnome org>
- Subject: Am looking for a Gnome Speaker.....
- Date: Tue, 6 Feb 2001 19:31:20 +0530
Hi there, I'm the session co-ordinator for BangLinux 2001, India's largest linux developer's conference scheduled for March 5-7. Up until last week, I was proud to have two Gnome talks lined up: A basic session introducing Gnome development with Gtk based on 1.2 but looking towards 1.4 A more advanced session on writing apps using Bonobo Much to my chagrin, my speaker regretfully pulled out, citing company commitments. Although he is looking for a replacement, I thought I should mail you and see if you could help me at all. I realize it is short notice, but if you could put me in touch with anyone who could give (both) these talks I would be most grateful. I can of course fly and put up anyone should they be available. I enclose a speaker information sheet for their reference, if you could pass it on. I've also attached a rough guide to the talks as we saw them. These are not cat iron - just in the general area. Please check out our session list at http://www.banglinux.com/schedule.php to get a feel for the sessions we are putting on. Thanks in advance, Dan ----- Dan Maharry, WroxIndia Banglinux 2001 : Return of the Penguin , March 5 - 7, 2001 Register now at http://www.banglinux.comTitle: UntitledBangLinux 2 Foreign Speaker Information
The following information is a collection of all the things you should know before Wrox's BangLinux Conference 2001. Please read through carefully and get back to me with any difficulties, at danm wrox com
Basic Information
- BangLinux 2 : Return of the Penguin takes place on 5 - 7 March 2001 at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India. This is the second instance of the sell-out conference that took place in February 2000.
- Those invited to speak will have their flights to and from Bangalore bought for them and their stay in a hotel (Le Meridien Holiday Inn) paid for. If the company that they work for can pay for or contribute towards their flight, so much the better. The conference acts as a non-profit making (read : loss-making) event for the furtherance of the open source community in India and as such would appreciate any help in making the loss as small as possible.
- This is a programmers' conference. Code is not a four letter word and examples, demos and theory are more than welcome, if not positively encouraged. 45 minute propaganda talks about how wonderful your latest product is will be taken away, burnt and then fed to the pigs.
- BangLinux will have a conference attendee pack including a CD of all the sessions that will take place during the three days. Each session will also be featured on our website at http://www.banglinux.com the slides from the sessions being added to the website after the conference has finished.
What We Need From You
Once we've agreed that you'll come and present at BangLinux, we will need a few things from you (sooner rather than later) for our website and publicity pack.
- Your slide presentation as an HTML page or group of pages. We'll also have a quick look over the slides when we get them and query any spelling mistakes, apparent contradicitions etc that we find to make it a better session.
- A three to four paragraph summary of the session's content
- Any code files to be used during the session
- Two or three professionally taken black and white photo or digital equivalent of sufficiently high resolution to survive resizing and printing. Preferably an actual photo for scanning. Wrox will reimburse the speaker for the photography upon production of a valid receipt.
- Finally, a short biography about yourself of about 100 words.
Technical Requirements
It is very important that we are aware of any additional technical requirements that you might have for the event as soon as possible. We will be providing a basic set of equipment and software for you to use - computer, probably Redhat Linux - but should you need any extras, please let us know. For example, each room will have one microphone, but if there are two speakers, we'll need to know so that we can provide an extra one. Alternatively, if you are planning to use your own laptop for the session, we will provide the necessary video feeds to plug into the projection unit.
If you have any queries about this, please let us know.What to Wear at the Events
Each speaker will be provided with a couple of Wrox 'Speaker' polo shirts for the speakers to wear for the duration of the event. These highly fashionable polo shirts are black with the word 'speaker' written in white letters on the reverse of the shirt, and come in a variety of sizes. This is the only dress restriction that we stipulate for the events, as we feel it is important to highlight who the speakers are. Authors should wear Wrox polo shirts and willingly make themselves available outside their allotted presentation times - this represents the Wrox brand as fully as possible by emphasising the accessibility of its 'Programmer to Programmer' ethos. We have found that the delegates feel at ease knowing who the speakers are, and knowing that they can chat to them if they wish - which greatly enhances the whole conference experience for them, which is never a bad thing!
Don't forget to tell us what size polo shirt you take. We've had awkward situations occur stemming from us running short of one size to be replaced with something smaller.
Birds Of A Feather Sessions
There will be two or three moderated general discussion sessions where those of a like mind can get together and talk about one topic - GUI Desktop development, n-tier web development, etc - and speakers are encouraged to come along and take part.
Summary: Start with an evangelical bit and a small example. Then cover a bit on GTK+ and how easy it is to develop windows, widgets, etc. Cover simple controls mainly. Then move on to an application that will be the main theme of the talk. Don't discuss the back-end code that actually does the processing, just cover the graphical bits and the signals. Perhaps the best way would be to separate the user interface and back-end into separate object files. Also, make sure that you mention the fact that everything has to be placed in a container and why and how this is really good. The application will lead into the Gnome stuff as you mostly only need to know about it, knowing how to program for GTK tends to mean you know how to program for GNOME, you just need to know the various widget names. New stuff has to be covered too, but don't cover much or anything on Bonobo as it could be a talk on its own. Audience: Assume they know nothing about GTK/GNOME programming. They might have tried to play with Tcl/Tk or maybe even Qt but they know nothing of GTK/GNOME. Base it from a C programming perspective so you can assume the audience know about C. Scope: Difficult as you could cover a lot in this talk. As much as possible try to limit it to the GUI sections of the toolkit. If it is simple, you could cover a bit of sound programming, but I doubt it is and either way, we could cover it on day two. Cover widgets, signals, and how to implement them. Explain also how each widget extends from others (Do they all extend from GtkWidget? I can't remember what the root one is. This allows for easier casting between objects in the code. Objective: To instruct the developer on how to build GUIs for their C programs.Title Bonobo Components Speaker Requirements A speaker who, preferably, has worked in developing Bonobo. We might be able to get Nat to speak on it assuming he has done some work on it. I can't find on the GNOME website any work that he has done. It is awkward I know but we really could do with someone from gnome.org, helixcode.com, or possibly someone from eazel.com who has worked on Nautilus. Actually, if we can get someone from Eazel, then we could use him/her as a keynote speaker (if we decide not to have Michael Dell, or otherwise). We can check with Nat first to see if he can do it, if not, I'd look to Eazel first if you can. Audience Any C developer, who may or may not have some experience in GTK+/GNOME programming, who wants to know what all the fuss is about and learn how to implement Bonobo components while they're at it. They need no experience in CORBA or COM. Summary Spend five minutes describing the philosophy behind Bonobo; describe briefly what COM/DCOM/COM+ or whatever is and why it is so good. It is possible that the audience have barely even heard of ActiveX components, never mind what they do. Explain where it comes from (in that it descends from CORBA) but explain to the audience that it isn't anywhere near as difficult as a traditional CORBA implementation (as it is possible some of the audience have tried to implement CORBA before). Then go into the technical stuff. First show a simple example by way of a roadmap. Something that uses some GTK widgets to display images, or use an existing application as an example. Start by explaining the Gnome::Unknown interface, detailing what it does and how it works. Show the structure of a Bonobo component, pointing out what every function does, etc. When the code is entered, how do you compile it? Show how to do that. Then show how to register it with ORBit. Finally, we need an example of! an application embedding the object. Show how to refer to a component and embed it within an application. I haven't been able to find any information but is Bonobo anything more than a visual component object model? That is, can we use bonobo components just to do file conversion (like use StarOffice's converter functions)? If so, then we need to explain how to use these (e.g. call a function and catch its return value which might be more than a GtkObject). End with a summary of the state of Bonobo. Describe what applications are using it and what is planned in the future. Scope I'd like to cover a lot, as there is so much I don't understand but we will have to cover just enough to create our own but not enough to understand fully. Use only one or two examples. If a complex example would confuse too early, then use two. Make one really simple and make the next implement as much functionality as possible as you will use that example to display how to use Bonobo. Obviously show how to insert the object into a container, but don't go into great detail. The one exception is that it would be useful to learn how to get components to return more than GtkObjects (in effect) so that you can use components transparently. If this cannot be done in the Bonobo model, and it is only possible through the full specification of CORBA, then let me know. -- Andrew Polshaw Technical Editor for Wrox Press andrewp wrox com 0121 687 4199 http://www.wrox.com/ http://www.wroxconferences.com/ http://p2p.wrox.com/
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