Castellers

Join us if you are interested ... there is a GF v3 DEV meeting right now. At http://www.ustream.tv/channel/theaquarium

The experience with uStream.TV during CommunityOne and JavaOne has been very good. Paul Sterk et al. used it during CommunityOne under somewhat challenging circumstances (see Recordings); and the JavaOne keynotes were professionally recorded (Sun GS 1, Sun GS 2, Sun GS 3, Sun GS 4) and look really good. I also did some small tests a couple of weeks before C1 and once this last week and it worked well.

Some years ago I used to host a Sun-internal technology weekly seminar that was quite popular; I had to stop doing it because of other responsibilities but I've been planning to restart it as a global public event as soon as I could find the right technology; uStream seems a good candidate and I want to give it a try. I created a TheAquarium TV channel and I want to start using it in the next few weeks for different events.

Overall, uStream.TV seems to have most wanted features. The setup is very easy for both broadcasters and audience, the quality is quite good and the technology seems to scale well. There are recording / playback capabilities and an online chat with moderation and polling and the host can invite additional hosts.

Below are some of the ideas that we could pursue with TA TV. They are in no particular order; give me your feedback and additional ideas; I'd like to start a few trials soon - I'll announce the trials at TheAquarium and in this blog.

GlassFish Technologies - GlassFish has many important technologies, we probably can do a weekly technical seminar just covering them. The traditional length of these presentations are 1 hour; we could start there and see how it works. Examples of technologes can include:

• Grizzly, OSGi, ....
• Comet, GWT, ...
• Clustering, Failover, ...
• Extensibility, Embeddability, Monitoring, ...

GlassFish Awards Program Series - Presentations based on the GAP Submissions.

MicroTalks or Lighting Talks - This is more a format than a specific topic. We could either have shorter presentations, or take several topics and bundle them into a full hour.

Use Cases and Architectures - Perhaps invite presenters from the Stories program?

Partners - Sun has a new GlassFish Partners Program and we could give them an opportunity to present what they are doing with GlassFish, with some guideance to make the presentations as useful to the audience as possible.

Geo-Focused Talks - One of my goals with this program is to reach outside of my immediate geographic location. That means beyond the San Francisco Bay Area, but also beyond the US, reaching through the globe into all the areas where there is interest for our technologies (see GF GeoMap). Clearly the internet helps but Time-Zones and culture/language may get in the way. A couple of ideas to explore are: having alternate broadcast times (say one for US-Europe, and another for Asia-Pacific), and having events that are hosted by special guests from around the world.

These are just some ideas, please let me know what you think. This is a new medium for me; I'm sure that, with your help, we will learn how to use it as we go through it.

I mostly blog at The Aquarium but that format is only useful for short entries. Every now and then I want / need to write longer pieces, so I'm resurrecting this blog for those cases. Now I only need to find the time to do the writing!

A final screencast before JavaOne 2006. I've done a Commentary on J1 Events Related to the GlassFish Community. The commentary runs for 10 minutes but hopefully you will find it useful.

I've uploaded a second screencast, this time a short (6 minute) skim through The GlassFish Implementation. I am almost certainly not going to be able to do localizations of the narrative until after JavaOne, at which point I am more likely going to do updates with all the announcements done at the conference.

Please be patient with my recording. There is a reason why I am an engineer, and not a radio announcer!

This is my first experiment with Camtasia Studio: I've created a short (8 minutes) Overview of Java EE 5. Check it out and let me know how it goes; I'm still very much learning my way through the product.

My plan has been to highlight these presentations through TheAquarium and to ask different people to provide localizations of the narrative to different languages (I could do spanish -castillian- and catalan). I already have ready another presentation about the GlassFish implementation but the pre-JavaOne craziness is in full-swing, so we will see how things go.

Note: The index works on my IE/PC combo but does not work on FireFox or on IE on my Mac. The presentation works fine so just treat the index as a ToC for now.