use Perl

Yes, I'm working on a comeback. The horrible situation that prevented me from doing what I want, when I want is over.

The main question that has been asked a lot in the past months was "is pVoice dead now?". The answer is "No". I will restart working on it in the weeks to come.

Other questions have been asked about my modules. As to my knowledge, nobody has actually taken over the maintenance of my modules, so I should be able to pick up that too. Soon.

The change for the better came just as sudden as the change for the worse 6 months ago, so give me some time to get back on track.

You'll be hearing from me.

Anyone who wants to become maintainer of any of my modules, just send me an email with your PAUSE id and I'll see how I can hand this over (if you know the HOWTO, let me know, I've never needed to do this before).
That also counts for the person who responded to my last use.perl journal entry who wanted to take over Win32::SAPI5

Without going into details (and no, don't mail me because I won't tell you), this posting is merely to let you all know not to expect anything from me in the months to come.

Something terrible is happening in my life and I can't predict when it will be over.

Any predicted releases or co-operations won't be happening, nor will I respond to any emails.

I can just hope it will all turn out ok.

This morning I left home around 9am and after a very tiring trip I arrived at my hotel in Brussels around 4pm. I wasn't thinking about EuroOSCON too much yet (more about how to finish pStory), but I had planned to go to the early registration at 5pm.

That was a good thought. I ran into Aron and -o darn I can't remember your name!-. We agreed to see each other again at 6 in front of the Plaza hotel to find a place to eat. When I got back, a lot of people from the EuroFoo were sitting in the lobby so I had to walk in and say hi to at least barbie, kudra, pdcawley, Jesse Vincent, Piers Harding and a few others. Later Jesse, Aron, Karen Pauley and -yes I still can't remember your name- went to the Groote Markt to grab something to eat. We had a very good time talking about anything and everything.

These early meetups always get me in the right mood: there's another conference coming up with many nice talks and lots of interesting people! Let the fun begin :)

Did I manage to finish my presentations last night? Yes. Did I feel satisfied? Not really. I felt ashamed actually. I still don't know why, but I cannot get pVoice to work on my own laptop. It simply does nothing. No window. No error. Period.

Now, if I didn't need the application itself, it wouldn't matter that much, but instead I was to give a presentation about pVoice! Now how do I demonstrate an application without being able to run it? I didn't know. Luckily I found an animated gif where (and old version of) pVoice is being demonstrated, and I used that instead.

So this morning at 10:10 I started the presentation for about 25 people in the Onion room. Although I felt very bad about not being able to actually demonstrate pVoice, I think the presentation went well. Or so I was told ;-)
After I finished Stray Toaster came up to me to tell me he was interested in contributing to the OA module I spoke about yesterday. And I was *very* delighted.

After the break I continued with my "Introduction to wxPerl" presentation, where I worked through by showing different examples, and changing them as I showed where to find the syntax of different methods in the documentation. The main complaint I think wxPerl is getting, is that it's poorly documented. That is so untrue. The problem is that people just don't know where to find the documentation or actually, how to use it properly. So my main focus was on finding the information you need in the documentation by showing examples that are readable and simple enough to extend.

By the way, I put links to the slides and the example code on [URL:http://wiki.birmingham2006.com].

After lunch I ran into my booking.com colleague Jacqueline Kerkmeijer, who represents our HR department here. We (booking.com) are desperately seeking qualified people and that's the main reason for us to sponsor YAPC. So Jaqueline is running the Booking.com booth at the conference, and I've seen her talking to quite a few interested people. Let's hope she's able to find a Few Good Men (or Women).

Yesterday evening I went to the Panama bar to meet up with the people who had already arrived for the conference. Having not been to the last two YAPC::Eu's, it was good to see all familiar faces again (and drinking a few beers with them :) ).

I went back to the hotel on time to try and fix a few bugs in the OA-module-to-be, because I wanted to show a little of it in my presentation of today. As I'm writing this, I'm attending the "The Inaccessibility of Perl" presentation by Stray Toaster, and I've just finished the last slides of my presentation of this afternoon.

Now I still have the other two presentations to finish, which I will be doing tomorrow. Since I've done both of them before, I hope it's merely a matter of updating these...I guess there will be no socialising tonight, but preparing instead...There are still more nights to catch up with that...

This afternoon I arrived in Birmingham for YAPC::Europe. The flight on the KLM Cityhopper was pleasant and swift, and as it turns out, the weather here is no different than in Holland ;-)

I had thought that immediately after checking into my hotel (the MacDonald Burlington) I could start writing the slides of my talk tomorrow "Accessible Applications in Perl". However, I hadn't even landed yet and the office called to check if I had been able to work out the Unicode bugs in SAP::Rfc with Piers Harding. Last night I had left the office very late while knowing that SAP::Rfc crashes in certain situations (when the last character of a field is a multi-byte unicode character), and I didn't know yet if Piers was able to fix it yet.

So I checked into my hotel, unpacked, opened up the lid of my laptop to find an open wifi hotspot, logged on, mailed Piers, and within minutes we were chatting and testing. At 5:30 (CET, I'm not yet functioning in BST) everything worked, I called the office to tell them, and I could finally start writing slides ;-(

As I write this, I have just finished the last slide (it's 6:30 BST now), but I really need to test it out to see if I have enough to fill the 20 minutes, or maybe even too much...

First off to grab some dinner and then back to the hotel to finish everything.

Why is it always so that I start with my presentations on the last days before conferences? This time I think it's not too difficult to explain: I only sent in my proposals on the last day, and expected to present only my pVoice presentation. However, all three presentations were accepted, and I had to prepare my 'Accessible applications in Perl', 'pVoice' and 'Introduction to wxPerl' talks.

Since then, work was extremely demanding, and when my holiday started, I got caught up with doing stuff with my kids so much, that there wasn't any time left to do anything else. Although I must say that part of that was writing a new application for Krista, based upon my new OA module, which of course I can use for my first presentation.

This Sunday, my kids will return to their mother, Monday will be a day at the office in Amsterdam, and Tuesday I'll be leaving for Birmingham already. If I weren't going to work with Piers Harding tonight to make sure the new Unicode compatible SAP::Rfc works for Booking.com, and I wasn't going to visit my sister for her birthday on Saturday (with the whole family of course), who lives in the other side of the country, I could say I have enough time to work on my presentations.

I have to really, really get it done in the spare moments I have left or else....

Since the basic functionality (except still the menu issues) of the OA module is done, I figured the way to get it ready to roll is to try and write a real-world application and see where more work needs to be done.

I'm confident that it's still far from finished, but by writing a real application, I can find out what works, what doesn't work and where I need to simplify things for the programmer. I'll be writing an accessible media player...hang on for more news

This striked me as quite a surprise. A Wx::MenuItem and also a Wx::Menu is not a subclass of Wx::Window. This means you can't query a menu's position, nor its size. Since that's not possible, I can't draw a box around a selected menu item to indicate (for a switch user) that it's selected.

Quite a disappointment, and I have no clue whatsoever how to solve it. I've dug in the wxWidgets sources, and it uses the platform-specific calls to create window menus, so there's no easy way to get around this.

I'm afraid I'm left with only two choices: either code my own menus and replace the wxWidget's menus (which is not an appealing option), or I'll drop the accessibility of menus (not attractive either).

Suggestions welcome!