Yesterday I presented at ApacheCon 2003 in Las Vegas. My talk on Scalable Internet Architectures was well received, but I have several complaint about the way things were done.

There was no planning staff in the room. I had to collect admittance passes myself. I had no microphone. Aside from the LCD projector, it was like teaching in a back alley.

Additionally, my presentation materials were not printed for the attendees of the tutorial session. As it was a tutorial (cost extra), they opted not to place the presentation materials on the CDROM. This means that the attendees had no way to take the information with them.

While my presentation was made in KeyNote (for Mac OS X), I did export it to PDF. I do have some complaints about the KeyNote PDF export and PPT export features. KeyNote supports a wonderful feature that allows images to me made partially transparent. I use this to place a dark image on a white background, tone the image to 20% translucency and then place dark text over it. While this technique as a nice professional touch to all the slides (and is completely readable), the export features make all incorporated images opaque. So, the PDF has black text of dark images. YMMV.

Included below is the original keynote presentation and a (poor) PDF export of the same slides.

  • ApacheCon 2003 – Las Vegas, Nevada
    Scalable Internet Architectures (KeyNote | PDF)