I just tagged and released wiki2beamer 0.9.2 which is a maintenance/bugfix release for the new features val and julius introduced with 0.9. I also added a new example presentation (did the old ones even work?). So if you need to prepare slides, make sure to get the latest wiki2beamer version from sourceforge.

Ah, and we also have a shiny new website

oldschool, huh? ;)

short story: meet us there, today, lightning talk. [slides|sources]

long story:
After I feared to get no tickets, yesterday, I finally got one (after waiting patiently in the line). Now I’ll give a 4-minutes Lightning Talk at the 26. Chaos Communication Congress were I will introduce wiki2beamer and point out, that is good for collaborative working and sourcecode-centric talks.

The slides are available as PDF and with all the sources.

update: video recording is online, other formats here

I just released wiki2beamer 0.8.1.

update: sping updated the ebuild for Gentoo, too

Yes it is…

As KDE4 (4.3.1) went stable on ~amd64 in Gentoo Linux, I accidently pulled it in and compiled it during my last emerge –update world. And as I had it installed I decided to just use it and make the full switch. Although it probably will have some bugs here and there, it seems to be pretty usable and it looks really damned beautifull. That again, comes with price: it’s slow. Interaction with the GUI is a litle bit unresponsive sometimes, but I guess I will get used to that. Most important applications are there and work. Only one important thing is still missing: a fully integrated KNetworkManager for KDE4. So long I’m using the KDE3.5 KNetworkManager, which works fine but looks a bit ugly. A good thing is, that power and display management seems to be integrated more nicely, the important special-buttons worked instantly.
I’m currently working on migrating all of the application-settings to KDE4.

I can see now why the Gentoo people will drop KDE3.5 out of the tree sooner or later. It just doesn’t make alot of sense to maintain something, that upstream doesn’t maintain anymore, or atleast not much.

update: disabling Nepomuk semantic desktop in the control panel (system settings->advanced->desktop search->enable nepomuk semantic desktop, uncheck) seems to increase performance and reduce power consumption.

Besides that, I had some free time at the it-sa security fair (where I gave a talk together with Daniel about our thesis) and coded some new features for wiki2beamer:

• selective slide compiling: mark a frame with a ! (!==== frametitle ====) to only compile the selected frame to latex. Speeds up compilation times during slide creation and also saves you battery when sitting in the train and making slides ;)
• shortcut syntax for \vspace and \vspace*: –2em– on a single line creates a vspace of 2em, –*2em– respectively creates a \vspace*
• shortcut syntax for \uncover and \only: +<2->{content} (uncover) and -<2->{content} (only)

As I once again hacked in the wiki2beamer code, it became clear that the code will become more or less unmaintainable. It’s just a matter of time until the complexity is too high. Wiki2beamer definitly needs a formal parser and syntax.

Some weeks ago, already, I released wiki2beamer 0.8. It’s mostly a maintenance release. It now works again with python 2.4 which makes it easier to run on ancient systems (like our universities ;) ), has a litle bug fixed where “expressions” immediatly following lists were not transformed (so you had to add a newline) and the license was changed to “GPL 2.0 or later” so we don’t get stuck in some copyright problems as time moves on.

I also put the manpage for wiki2beamer online here (via man2html) so google can find it and non-*nix users can read it, too.

I should probably finish my thesis before I start coding at wiki2beamer, but if anyone out here is interested, there still are some things to be done:

1. Create a Lessig-style slide environment, like the [code]-environment
2. Split the code into a commandline wiki2beamer frontend and a python module as backend
3. Write a formal syntax description, so we can create a real parser/compiler instead of these regular expression tricks.
4. Build distro packages. (Fedora, RedHat, Arch, … anyone? Gentoo already has one. Update: I’ve built a Debian/Ubuntu package now, too. Go get it at SourceForge.)
5. Build a windows installable package. (?)
6. Update online documentation.

Also, we finally seem to get users :)
According to the sourceforge download statistics, we had 86 downloads in the last 2 months.

So, add one and head over to get wiki2beamer 0.8.