During the Free and Open Source Conference (FrOSCon) 2011, I had the chance to give a presentation on the Dojo Toolkit, an Open Source JavaScript library that helps to ease the development of AJAX websites and Rich Internet Applications (RIA). At Univention, I am currently involved in a redesign of our extensive administration frontend for the Univention Corporate Server, our business Linux distribution. For this project, we strongly rely on Dojo in combination with a server backend written in Python 🙂 .

You can find my slide at slideshare.net.

I wanted to share a neat trick that I found to be working great for OpenOffice Impress presentations. I’m using the Presenter Console under Ubuntu, i.e. two screens, and wanted to show on mouse click videos at full screen resolution (on the video beamer screen, of course). In addition to that, I wanted to include videos with a relative path, i.e., relative with respect to the presentation (.odp) file. I finally managed to do this by writing a generic makro which calls a bash script that runs mplayer. For each video file in the presentation, I added an additional one-liner makro with the video path. Then, in the presentation, I would insert an image (e.g., sample frame of the video, but this can also be anything else, text, buttons etc.) and add a makro action (right click on the object or image -> interaction -> action at mous click = run macro) which would correspond to the makro containing the (relative) path to the video I would like it to play.