Chris Leong: Sydney Uni. Campus Ambassador

Hi, I'm Chris Leong - welcome to my blog. I am the Sun Campus Ambassador for Sydney University. Through out the year I will be running demos on Sun technology and tutorials. If there are any topics you would like me to cover, I will consider them if there is enough interest. I will try to make this interesting as well as informative. There will generally be some free food and other freebies. If you have any questions about any Sun technologies, feel free to talk to me and I will do my best. I am considering setting up a mailing list where you can go for help about any Sun technology. If you want CD/DVDs for any Sun software, including Netbeans and Solaris, please email me.

In case you don't know me, I'll put a short introduction. I am in the second year of studying Science (Adv Maths) at Sydney University. I will be doing a double major in Maths and Computer Science. Last year I was a mentor for SOFT1001/1901. I am also the Industry Representative for the Sydney University IT Society (SUITS). I would strongly advise you SUITS if you haven't already.

So I suppose you might want to know what I'll be demoing this semester. There will be at least five demos this semester, and two of them will be with high performance computing using Solaris. Some of you might wonder why you would want to know about Solaris. The first reason is that Solaris has been designed to be friendly to developers. It is built to provide security, stability and performance. Plus its free and open source.

While the other demo topics haven't been finalised yet, here is what they will probably be on. The Sun technology which is probably of the most interest to you is Java. While the courses at the university are good, there are some really useful skills which they don't teach you, and which you'd normally have to pick up yourself. I believe that teaching, at least the basics, would be extremely benefical to students. Two topics I'd especially like to teach are:

* SWING, which allows you to make cool, OS independant, interfaces for your Java applications.

* Netbeans, which is an intergrated development environment, especially suited for Java, which can significantly simplify and speed development. It contains a visual editor for SWING.

* Web 2.0 technologies, with Java and Netbeans. Netbeans contains some technologies that are very useful for webdevelopment even if you are only using HTML and javascript.

I have a Sun SPOT kit (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_SPOT), which demonstates the use of java on mobile devices. Sun SPOTS have been used for many cool stuff, including controlling swarms of robots, emulating a Wii controller, and my personal favourite - controlling a robotic hand (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9P6Jn0iuYA0&feature=related)!!! I have a Sun SPOT kit (and could possibly gain access to some more Sun SPOTs through the School of IT if necessary), so talk to me if you think of anything awesome to do with it.

I will add more detail about talks when I finalised them.