One of the first people I met at BarCamp was David Hayward who was playing with a Nintendo DS equiped with a motion sensor. On the second day I atteded his talk about the effects of AI in games, and I was amazed with his “hand drawn slides” which was a style I recognized from a post once at PresentationZen (can’t find the link at the moment, but I will keep looking).

When I later on talked with David he tolled me that his was actually not how he intended his slides to be but just a result of bad preparation. The slides where actually handdrawn on some paper and shot with his nice DSLR camera in the gravel between some plants. I still think it brings some kind of Zen-garden style to the slides and it proves that you don’t always need fancy slides to make your point.

David on the left

Are you done using your Palm, trying to sync it with your pc and then have it to get to recognize your terrible handwritting? Don’t look any further because here is the new GTD (getting things done) tool: The Hipster PDA. The concept is very efficient and some people have even made templates for different activities.

There are a lot of interesting people here in London, including my new neighbour who will start working at Symbian in April. For his final project at university he made a VNC viewer for Symbian. The tool allows you to use your symbian phone to control anything running VNC server. Today he gave me a demo and I was really impressed.

So, I managed to create a nice web-app in RoR in very little lines of code, and it even has user login! Now the real problem that I encountered is this: how do you deploy a simple web-app with RoR? I mean, I don’t want to put the code on SVN and then use some advanced system like Capistrano to deploy my app to 5 servers. I just have a Mac Mini with integrated Apache and 4 users that will use the product. How do I do a SIMPLE deployment?

It is just weird that an app that is so meant for developers with deadlines, it is very badly documented on how to do a simple deployment!

Today the Merlin Show Podcast was launched and Episode 2 features an interview between Merlin (43folders productivity guru) and Jonathan Coulton (Code Monkey).