OR08 "Repositories and Scientific Data" – the challenge of complexity

I’m at OR08 – normally I would try to blog the meeting but (a) I am recovering from my preentation and (b) I’m off to NL to defend Egon Willighagen’s thesis. So these posts will be bitty…
I was honoured to be asked to kick of the meeting and chose the title above. In my presentations I generally don’t know what I am going to say in detail – I have a menu of several hundred slides and choose on-the-fly, depending in part on the audience (their backgrounds, interests, etc.) . This occasion took this to new heights.
I’d prepared a number of interactive demos – OSCAR, OSCAR3, videos from JoVE: Journal of Visualized Experiments , Eclipse Unit tests, and a movie from Andrew Walkingshaw. At least three of these have never been shown in public, so this was fairly ambitious.
Andrew had prepared his movie on MAC (and bought the pukka Apple movie generator). He mailed it to me – I downloaded QuickTime and iTunes on Vista. It showed a movie of polar bears in a think snowstorm (i.e. white on white). No matter what I and Jim did in the small hours of the morning we couldn’t get it to run. So we planned to run it on Jim’s machine and switch the video when necessary.
Then I found out that because the conference was oversubscribed there was an overflow room. So the presentations were geared to use Powerpoint running on a dedicated Mac….
Um… So the Soton techies (who did a great job) linked my output not through the VGA but through the VPN on an RJ45. Linked through a VPN to the other room.
Years of presenting have thrown up some fun situations. Henry Rzepa and I created chemical presentations (Mage, RaMOL) for WWW1 at CERN in 1994. We prepared it two days in advance. Then, before the meeting, someone deleted the shared libraries (*.so) to “save space”. We got the demo working at – I think – T+5 (i.e. 5 mins after Henry had started presenting). Another when stewardess spilt coffee over my laptop – it recovered except that the semicolon key crashed the machine and to type an “a” it had to be cut and pasted from existing text.
You can see what is coming. The complexity of the system – movie -> Vista -> VPN -> Mac -> Screen bombed. We abandoned the VPN (in real time) and rebooted. When Vista reboots it is nice and leisurely so gives natural spaces for me to fill in. When it finally came up there were two displays – one on my machine and one on the screen. But they were different. So I had to drive the talk from the screen …
I have no idea what I said, so I can’t blog it. I hope I got most of the messages over. I’ll try to remember some of the things I’d like to have said and blog this later.
But it was fun for April 1…