Steve On Java

I had a great team hacking with the JUGICE members in Iceland last night as the first stop on the Nordic NightHacking Tour. They created some pretty cool projects in JavaFX for the Raspberry Pi within only a few hours (many of whom had never tried JavaFX before):

You can see that these guys are real geeks (Pacman), but have the weather on their mind quite a bit (Snowplow), so why are they in Iceland? Here are some of the reasons I came up with for being a hacker in Iceland:

1. Tired of Monitor Glare

In the winter Iceland only has 4-5 hours of sunlight, so forget about fancy anti-glare screens or fighting with the blinds… you won’t need it in Iceland!

2. You Aren’t Good at Sharing Bandwidth

There is nothing I hate more than my neighbors slowing down my Java update by playing games or downloading movies. In the U.S. they typically oversell bandwidth in the hopes that most consumers won’t use it. In contrast, Iceland is one of the top countries in the world for internet access with over 8% of the broadband connections using optical fiber and 626.8 Mbit/s per 10,000 population. My informal test at the JUGICE meeting broke the speed test, hitting their max test threshold of 100 Mbit/s on both download and upload!

3. You Like Your Sushi Properly Aged

Sushi is a great food for hackers, but it can be dangerous if it is not fresh enough. Fortunately, the Icelandic people have perfected the art of fish preservation so you don’t have to worry about your wind-dried fish, shark, or seal’s flippers going bad.

Yum, Harðfiskur!

4. Your Home Supercomputer Cluster is Destroying the Planet

You need good tools to do hacking, and that often comes at the price of power conservation. I am pretty sure every time I run a compile on my beefy quad-core system, the temperature of the earth goes up by a fraction of a degree. Fortunately, in Iceland all the power comes from renewable geothermal sources, so you can run your very own supercomputer cluster in your basement!

Note: You don’t really have to move to Iceland to do this, because the folks at Green Cloud have figured out how to package this up as a service so you can remotely take advantage of Iceland’s renewable natural resources.

5. You’ve Always Wanted to Meet Gosling’s Cousins

Iceland has a complete genealogy tree dating back to the Norwegian settlers in the 9th century, and geneologists say that all Icelanders are descendants of bishop Jón Arason. James Gosling is half Icelandic on his mother’s side, so when he went to visit last time he was surprised how many cousins he had! Maybe it is worth a trip just to visit all 320,000 of the relatives of the Father of Java.

I certainly had a great time in Iceland and would recommend at least a visit.

In the meantime, join the rest of the live-streamed trip throughout Northern Europe on the NightHacking Nordic Tour:

http://nighthacking.com/

I just finished my NightHacking Tour across Europe. In 3 weeks, I hit 2 conferences, 5 user groups, and did over 30 interviews with NightHackers in 7 different countries.

Some of the highlights included:

• Motorcycle ride-ons at JFall and Devoxx (Thanks Bert and Stephan!)
• JUG hacking events in London, Munich, Tourin, Lyon, and Paris
• Dancing robots at Aldebaran Robotics

In case you missed any of the NightHacking sessions the past month, I put together a YouTube playlist containing all of the video files:

And you can catch the photos from across Europe in my NightHacking Flickr Stream:

So what is next? Well, I have a few ideas, but can use your help to decide what to do. So here is a short survey you can take to let me know what should be the next NightHacking event.

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Also, I have been thinking of doing a NightHacking Show at a regularly scheduled time with online guests.

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If you have other comments or suggestions for NightHacking, please leave them in the comment section below.

If you haven’t been watching the live stream of the NightHacking Tour, you have been missing out on a lot of geeky fun.

I am only 1/3 through the tour route, but I have already had some pretty amazing sessions with Java Champions, Speakers, Authors, and Java User Groups.  Here are some of the talks you might want to check out:

• Sven Reimers with a prototype JavaFX port of the NetBeans UI
• Angry nerds, JavaFX Pinball, and other geeky coolness with Toni Eppel
• Java Champion, Adam Bien, showing his JavaFX performance profiling app
• A reverse interview by Toni and Adam standing in front of my motorcycle in Munich
• Live JUG hacking sessions with the Munich JUG and London Java Community
• JFXtras and behind-the-scenes look at the JFall keynote with Tom Eugelink
• Build security exploits with Sander Mak
• Discussion of modular design with Chris and Paul at JFall
• Interview with Trisha Gee on women in computing and no-sql databases
• Chat and brainstorming with Stephen Colebourne on JSR 310 and JVM languages
• GroovyFX hacking with Russel Winder
• Interview at Ben Evans’ hood
• 1-on-1 chat with James Gosling

Just tonight I had a great session with Terrence Barr where he showed a motorized solar cell controlled via a Java embedded board. Here is the video from the session:

I announced the Starcraft 2 Coders Challenge at Devoxx in Belgium. This is a little off topic for my coding blog, but an interesting aside for anyone who enjoys Real Time Strategy (RTS) gaming.

As a genre, I find RTS games interesting for the following reasons:

• Matches are online, testing your skills and wit against other human opponents
• The matches are relatively short (~15 minutes on average), but extremely intense
• After you get the mechanics down, winning is all about strategy
• The options for build order, troop composition, and tactics make it a great discussion topic

The original Starcraft came out back in 2000 and was a huge hit. In the past decade it has become one of the most popular online games in the world, selling over 9.5 million copies. Just under half of those were sold to South Korea where Starcraft and Pro-gaming has become close to a national sport. One of the features of the game is a 3 race system with hundreds of patches and tweaks that have gone into game balance to improve the playability of matches.

I mostly swore off games many years ago to increase my development productivity (as a developer there is a limited amount of focused time you can spend in front of the computer).  However, with the release of Starcraft 2 I started picking up matches between coding sessions as a mental break.  At this point I am probably one of the few people who has bought the game and never tried the single player campaign. However, I am quite skilled at multiplayer matches with a diamond gaming rank.

If you are interested, I am taking challenge matches via this blog.  Simply click on the SC2 Challenge link in the menu and submit your account information so I can arrange a match.  The only criteria is that you can program (Java, JavaFX, Javascript, Actionscript, etc.).  Standard 1v1 quick match rules apply.

The first person to take me down will get their match featured on my blog (I promise not to broadcast losing matches).

As a teaser, here is a short webcast of a recent random match-up I played online (complete with some announcer voiceovers explaining what is happening):

View in High Definition

At some point I will probably post some information on how to capture, convert, and post high quality videos. This was non-trivial for various reasons, but will come in handy with some other coding related videos I plan to post soon (Visage on Android anyone?).

Let the battle begin!

I am pleased to announce that we have a couple new videos available on the Silicon Valley JavaFX User Group (SvJugFx) video site. Here is a link to the landing page where you can watch these videos as well as all our previous sessions:

http://web.ubivent.com/svjugfx.html

The first new video is a Hands-On JavaFX Lab given by Stuart Marks, core JavaFX team member, and regular SvJugFx attendee. This was our most successful meeting so far for the local audience, because it filled in the gap between the very technical rich presentations we started with and the experience level of the attendees. The entire flood tutorial was published as an HTML document, but it is much more entertaining to see Stuart do it first hand:

Hands-on JavaFX:  http://jnlp.ubivent.com/jnlp/eventid=10/guest=1/path=doc:129,doc:128,doc:210

The second was the wildly popular Bay Area JUG Round-Up event.  All the Bay Area user groups cooperated to host a massive event with a live recording of the Java Posse.  Oracle sponsored the event, with an introduction by Justin Kestelyn and update on Java.net from Sonya Barry.  And of course the Java Posse did an amazing job working the crowd with some hilarious techie humor.

Justin Kestelyn: http://jnlp.ubivent.com/jnlp/eventid=10/guest=1/path=doc:129,doc:128,doc:217,goto:v:-0

Sonya Barry: http://jnlp.ubivent.com/jnlp/eventid=10/guest=1/path=doc:129,doc:128,doc:217,goto:v:-1

The Java Posse: http://jnlp.ubivent.com/jnlp/eventid=10/guest=1/path=doc:129,doc:128,doc:217,goto:v:-2

For our meeting next month we have the esteemed Max Katz coming to speak on Enterprise JavaFX.  He will demonstrate how to use the open-source Flamingo framework to connect a JavaFX application to an enterprise backend using JBoss Seam.  For those of you who don’t know, Exadel also develops an Eclipse plug-in for JavaFX, which he will be using for all his coding examples.  It should be an exciting event, so please sign-up to attend in person or online:

Enterprise JavaFX with Max Katz:  http://www.svjugfx.org/calendar/13605800/

This past month we had a great combined meeting of the Silicon Valley JavaFX User Group (SvJugFx) together with the Silicon Valley Web User Group.  The presenters included Richard Hyde and James Allen from Oracle on the Java Store and Yoav Landman and Fred Simon from JFrog on repository management with Artifactory.

Our April SvJugFx presentation will feature Stuart Marks from the JavaFX Team in Hands on JavaFX – Scripting the Scene Graph.  To attend in person or via our live web stream (and be eligible for great prizes!), please sign-up here: http://www.svjugfx.org/calendar/12863551/

We were also fortunate enough to be contacted by the folks at Ubivent who have developed a JavaFX-based event platform.  Their platform is used by large corporations like SAP, and they have generously offered to host our videos going forward.  Therefore, you can now watch all the SvJugFx videos using JavaFX technology!

To watch the latest videos, you can go to the landing page for the new SvJugFX Video Site:

Registration is optional, but will allow you to comment on the presentations.  Once you launch the application you will be taken to an event hall that lets you choose which presentation you want to watch:

Finally, when you click on a presentation you will be given a virtual theater experience with side-by-side slides and video.  You can click on the double arrows to expand it to full screen, skip around by chapter, and comment on the video as you are watching.

For convenience, here are some links that will take you directly to the two videos and their associated slide shows:

Java Store & Java Warehouse Overview (video) (slides)

Repository Management with JFrog Artifactory (video) (slides)

Also, we have posted the videos on our Parleys SvJugFx Space and will continue to do that for folks who like using this excellent presentation platform.

This is the second installation of my Live Streaming Guide, which will go over all the hardware you need to get setup.  While you can spend tens of thousands of dollars on professional gear, it is possible to put together a high quality setup for a fraction of that cost.  You may also be able to reuse some of your existing hardware, further reducing the cost.

This setup is targeted at streaming a live presentation over the internet that includes a speaker and possibly some slides or a demo.  Not all of this hardware is required to get started, so I will present it in order of how critical it is to the quality of the presentation.

If you are just interested in knowing what I recommend and how much it will run you, skip to the Buying Guide.

Choosing a Camcorder

The first thing you will need is a camcorder to stream the video.  The reason to go with a camcorder rather than a webcam is that you will have more options for lenses and zooming, and will be able to get a much higher resolution (as high as 1920×1080 for HD).  HD camcorders are pretty common and fairly inexpensive; a good one can be bought new for around $600.  Also, chances are that you or someone you know already has one that you can take advantage of.

One important consideration for camcorders is the computer interface.  If the camcorder supports Firewire (IEEE 1394), you are in pretty good shape.  This means it will probably support DV or HDV streaming to a laptop that has Firewire, and video streaming software will automatically pick it up as an input device.  A popular model for doing video streaming is the Canon Vixia HV40 which can be purchased for around $650 new:

Canon Vixia HV40

Read the rest of this entry »

Recently I have been doing a lot of research, experimentation, and processing of videos for the Silicon Valley JavaFX User Group.  We decided from day 1 that we wanted to take things up a notch by providing high quality web streaming of our events.  It makes particular sense for us, because the JavaFX community is spread all around the world, and we want to be able to reach as wide of an audience as possible.  However, once you have everything setup the overhead is minimal, so it is worthwhile to do for any user group or event.

Video setup for the first SvJugFx meeting with myself (left) and Keith Combs (right) running the rig.

Because this is a fairly in depth subject, I am going to cover it in a 4 part blog series.  Here are the topics (links will be added as each entry is published):

• Part 1 : Introduction – You are reading it!
• Part 2 : Hardware – This will give you an idea what hardware you need (including how to reuse what you have available).
• Part 3 : Broadcasting – A step-by-step guide on how to stream video live from your event and tools to let your remote audience interact.
• Part 4 : Post-processing – How to take the video assets you have and process them for upload complete with slides.

By the end of this series you will be able to walk in to almost any venue and do live streaming on the spot.  You will also be able to post-process professional videos like Hinkmond’s February JavaFX Mobile talk.

Please drop feedback or comments below on anything specific you are interested on hearing me cover beyond what I have already mentioned!