FJ-310

Well... I'm halfway through my java course, "Developing Applications with Java EE", taught by Philip Seymour. He's doing a bang-up job considering. This is a Sun Microsystems course hosted at QA:IQ's office in Tabernacle St, London. There are 14 (or maybe 15?) of us crammed into room 102 on the first floor, where we're trying somehow to cover this huge subject in 5 days. We have Sun Solaris boxes to do this on, which are pretty much museum pieces - unlike the speed machines we had at Eclectic in Glasgow for my SL-275 course, these guys run Netbeans 5.5 (not the 6.0 latest version) on a 500MHz CPU. Yeah, seriously. 500MHz for Sun Application Server, Netbeans 5.5 & Solaris 10 with a Gnome front-end instead of CDE. It's a case of click, wait, go make a coffee, return, oh, it's updated at last! Meanwhile, poor old Philip has to cover all the modules in time, but if you look at the textbook, there's a LOT to the subject matter that isn't being mentioned. Blink & you'll miss it. I'm 2 practical modules behind, largely because we've twice the students we had in Glasgow & unlike BEA Systems' courses, the labs don't tell you every button click you need.
This is actually quite a good thing in some respects, as it forces you to think, and when you notice the labs being almost purposefully vague, the chances are that somewhere in the immense spiral bound text that you've at best skim-read, there's something that actually tells you what to do. As Philip says, it's not something to get depressed about as you're meant to cover the labs at your own pace, and I'm studying in some cases with people who've already been developing JSPs, EJBs etc for a while, but I'm beginning to despair of getting it all done. What you need isn't just the labs & time to do them at home, but the instructor there & able to answer all your questions - but with such a huge class it'd be impossible for everyone to get a look-in. This isn't a complaining post, at least not 100% - Philip Seymour has so far delivered the magisterial portions of the course in a humourous & engaging style, and he's done his best to explain things in terms of design patterns we can make use of in our professional careers, so we'll be starting with some useful knowledge, but there Just Isn't Time to learn all this to the level where I'll be comfortable with it, not in a week. I can see myself over the next 2 years re-covering all the course material - not 2 years for just this course, but for the 2 other courses I've done lately.
I'm going to spend the next few weeks cramming, mind-mapping & experimenting with the material covered in Fj-310. I think I may need to do 315, the JSP & Servlet course, which apparently goes into a lot more detail about JSPs & Servlets.

Quickie Post

1: Today's my dad's birthday. Happy birthday, Dad!
2: I'm finally on my J2EE course. Fate hasn't intervened again - the course wasn't cancelled; there's plenty of people here, and the instructor's pretty darned good. Definitely knows his stuff. So much better than people who Just Know How To Teach The Course As It Is Written. Yay!

Mogulus

I just had a go at Mogulus, & wow... that thing's quite complex. And I'm (sorta) used to iMovie HD & the like. There's nothing on my channel yet; I was just trying to get to grips with using it to create a short bit of movie via the webcam. Fiddly as heck, frankly. I can't really recommend using a webcam/real-time web recording thing like that if you want pro results. There's too much to do between presenting the thing & producing it at the same time. Better to at least get someone to film it on a camcorder. This rather explains what I was on about on Sarah's blog earlier. As a quick & dirty, get it down & get it out kind of thing, yeah, it's great (free too), but I recommend the following if you're going to use Mogulus:

• Don't use the live broadcast / record functionality from a webcam
• Do get someone to operate the camera for you - or at the very least,
• Record to HD using whatever local video software you like best,
• Use a proper editing app to get it edited, and
• Upload the finished product to Mogulus.

I know it's not the point of having sites like Mogulus, but that's honestly the best way IMHO.
Nuff respect to Sarah for today's PopSnap - her edits today were razor sharp. Good stuff.

Criticism vs Help

You may remember I mentioned Sarah Meyers' excellent blog a few days ago, and her tech newscast, PopSnap. I think both blog & newscast are great, top-notch stuff, but Uncov called her "embarrassingly vapid", which I think was a bit uncalled for, not to mention untrue. Sarah's only been doing video journalism online since Spring last year, and if you check the archives of her stuff, she's come a long way fast (and some of her past stuff's bloody good too). If you read her blog, anyone can see she's put a lot of thought and a lot of work into this. She's serious about it, and wants to make PopSnap a real heavyweight news site. According to Wikipedia, she not only hosts PopSnap but writes & produces it as well - that's a heck of a lot of skill to develop in a relatively short time. Sarah took Uncov's remark with remarkably good grace, saying she liked him & wished he'd update more. Personally, I commented on her blog with a bit of constructive criticism, playing the devil's advocate, but I'm afraid I'm just making her self conscious when basically there's nothing wrong that more experience won't fix. D'oh!

In short - Sarah: massive kudos. Everyone else: Go read! Go watch!

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Slow Friday

Today seems to be going *very* slowly. I can hardly wait to set off
home. Nothing to do, nothing to read, really, that I haven't already
read. C'mon - entertain me! Gimme some (WORK-SAFE) links to giggle at...

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Flocking

This is sort of a test post from my recently downloaded Flock 1.0 browser. Dunno how good it'll be...

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Am I the only one

...who thinks Apple's MacBook Air is at best unremarkable, and at worst a piece of crap? I mean, sure, it's thin, but it's slower than existing MacBook Pros, slower than other thin laptops out on the market, has 2Gb of non-expandable memory (where Dell's thin equivalent has 3Gb & is expandable), no optical drive, no ethernet port, 1 measly USB port... Quite honestly I couldn't be bothered with a computer like that. Any weight saving on the MBA itself will surely be made up for by the endless list of clobber you'll have to carry in your laptop case with it. Surely if you're selling half a MacBook Pro, it should be half the price of one? Where's the MacBook Pro Tablet, huh? Now *that* is something I would buy.

(PS: I own 3 Macs: an iMac, a Mini & a MacBook Pro, & I love 'em all. I just reserve the right to pass on the Kool-Aid)

Art Trouvé

Here are a few things I've found over the past few days:

CASH music
CASH Music is a Coalition of Artists & Stake-Holders. The idea is that content producers, be they musicians, artists, writers or whatever, can use the site to publish their content under a creative commons license. Kristin Hersh, previously of Throwing Muses fame, is so far their only artist (they started in November, so it's early days yet) & she's released 2 new tracks there under an Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license. The idea behind that is that in much the same way as old traditional folk songs used to be copied, changed, re-worded, re-arranged & so on, according to who was playing them & the times they were living in, so people will re-mix, mash up, cover, adapt etc Kristin's work. So far her two tracks have given rise to a couple of dozen derived works. She wants people to be inspired by her work to create poetry, art, more music etc, and to post their derivative works back to CASH music, for other people to do the same with. In this way, we'll get an expanding community of creativity. The site's founder, Donita Sparks (from L7), will be publishing some of her own music there soon. If you're interested, go sign up.

Sarah Myers
...has a blog over at Wordpress, which is all about geek stuff. Just lately she interviewed Steve Wozniak about pranks & civil disobedience. Go read it! She also does a daily Net TV show over at Popsnap.net, which may be worth watching (though I can't cos I'm behind a fscking firewall... grr...) - & which I'll go check out tonight.

Update: Just checked out Popsnap, & it's excellent - very funny, geeky-dorky & cute. It's somewhat different from the blog, which has some quite involved articles. Popsnap kind of reminds me of Soccergirl's podcasts - it seems much more played for laughs.