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While flipping through the Oracle presentations about the acquisition of Sun Microsystems, I came across some examples of meaningless clip-art. I know not everyone can have Steve Jobs’ level of presentation slickness, but it seems really odd to me that someone actually thought: “You know what will help get our message across?  An image of two golden stick figures with a huge measuring tape.” or “A stick figure with a huge paint roller really brings home our point!”.

If this was some local presentation I wouldn’t have been too surprised, but this was  during a presentation on how Oracle will manage their $7 billion acquisition.  This scenario is definitely one where you want to be bringing your communication “A game”.  The weird thing was that I only see this type of clutter on one of the seven presentations.

I’d recommend that whoever is in charge of creating the slides get a copy of Presentation Zen or similar books.

Photo by John @ ThinkHole.com

On Tuesday night I gave a presentation on ZFS to the Central PA Linux User Group. Since the audience was a Linux user group, I wasn’t expecting too many in the crowd to be familiar with ZFS, but I was pleasantly surprised that about 40% of the ~ 20 people in attendance had used ZFS in some capacity. If you are already a seasoned ZFS user, I would highly recommend Richard Elling’s ZFS presentation which he uses in his day-long tutorials.

I was just reading a presentation on SSD performance for PostgreSQL and came across a graph that made my head spin

If you eyeball it, it appears that the hard disk drive (HDD) is roughly 40% as fast as the solid state disk (SSD) for a specific test.  The presentation author did include the yellow star to the right highlighting the fact that the difference is actually 0.5%, but why not make the graph start at 0 so the graph visusally represented the results or  if the difference is that small, don’t have a graph at all and just say there is essentially no difference for this type of benchmark.

I think the way the graph was made was very likely the result of the default settings that the charting tool used, and I don’t think the author had any intention of misleading people (especially since he highlighted the real difference outside the graph),  but if I generated a graph that I felt didn’t reflect what I was trying to convey I would fix it or leave it out.

Besides the egregious graph, I think the presentation overall was very good.  I especially liked the recommendation section at the end, which was very actionable.