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In A Different LightPosted by editor on April 13, 2007 at 7:48 AM PDT
Tuning in to these developer videos? So, do you watch the developer interview videos? I figure someone must, because they're popping up all over the place (including, among many others, SDN Channel, InfoQ [click the "interviews" tab on the right], BeJUG/JavaPolis/Parleys.com, and TheServerSide). And I'm intrested to know, is this driven by demand, or supply? Are developers particularly intersted in seeing and hearing top developers in an interview format, or are these sites putting it out there because technology has made it easy to do? [If you're going to vote in the poll, you may want to do so now before I bias your vote with the next paragraph.] In one of my other blogs, this for O'Reilly's Digital Media site, I recently decried the underlying assumptions (or lack of genuine thought and understanding) and formats of these videos, in We Need an Aesthetic for Technical Interview Video (hurry, my eyes are bleeding). What I'd like to see is a deep re-think of the value of putting video in front of developers and demanding their entire attention; is seeing someone speaking on a single static shot for 20 minutes really valuable? Would you be better off just listening to the interview on an iPod while commuting to work? Or quickly reading a transcript over lunch? There's value in seeing real people, but does this approach really keep the video channel full? I'm interested to hear from people who like these videos and see value in them that I apparently don't.
One thing that I don't really get into in the blog is the idea of whether the interview, or straight exposition, is the only valid form for online videos about Java development. One of the "steps" of content/art that I discuss is the idea of idiom, meaning how you address your audience. Nearly all these videos are largely expository: either one person talking, or someone talking for long stretches in response to an interviewer's quetsions. But that's not the only option. Consider narrative: can we talk about Java in the form of a story? Of course! Matt Quail did just that a few years ago in the brilliant
Totally GridBag, a humorous reminder of the drudgery of developing GUI's with the only really powerful layout manager of the time, the Apropos of all this thinking about technical-content videos, I decided to have the latest java.net Poll ask the question "How often do you watch online developer interview videos?" Cast your vote on the front page, then visit the results page for current tallies and discussion. In today's Weblogs, Fabrizio Giudici wants an update on Java for the Mac, in light of the delay of the next release of the OS. In Mac OS X 10.5 delayed to October: what about Java 6?, he writes: "Apple has just posted bad news: the release of Mac OS 10.5 (Leopard) has been delayed to October. With the usual arrogance, Apple has never disclosed to Java developers its official plans about Java 6, but since the latest pre-release dates several months back we have understood that the final release is bound to Leopard." In Sun acquires SavaJe intellectual property, John O'Conner reports "Sun announced Thursday that it will purchase the intellectual property of SavaJe. I'm thinking Sun should get the assets for about $2.99...the cost of a CD and postage." Cay Horstmann checks in with a closures-related talk, as Dr. Gafter comes to SJSU: "I got an email from Neal Gafter: "Hey, it's really cool to see your reference to BGGA in a SJSU lab assignment!" I asked if he could give a talk at the department seminar, to which he graciously agreed. We had a packed room today." In Java Today, Project Mango has graduated from the incubator to a Java Enterprise project. Mango is the open source alternative for Machine-to-Machine (M2M) software (also known as SCADA, HMI, or domotics). Mango is browser-based, Ajax-enabled M2M software that enables users to access and control electronic sensors, devices, and machines over multiple protocols simultaneously. It provides an interface with which diverse data sources can be created and configured along with an intuitive rules engine for setting up access, monitoring, alerts, data logging, control, transformation, and communication. "There is a raging debate about OSGi and Jini, yet again. Which isn't necessary or helpful." In Jini and OSGi, yet again, Jim Waldo writes, "I had been ignoring the discussion within the Jini community, hoping it might be simply local or just go away. But seeing someone be reasonable gave me hope that it might be time to think about these things in a clear way for a change." The methods people commonly think of for controlling threads were deprecated long ago, and are not safe to use. In the ONJava article Controlling Threads by Example, Viraj Shetty shows the appropriate techniques for starting, pausing, resuming, and stopping activities taking place in a multithreaded application. In today's Forums, Alexander Alexeev discusses cqME framework process in Re: [Issue 93] New - Ability to declaratively specify Interview class is needed. "It is good practice to support legacy code while creating new API. But we are currently in more comfortable situation then other libraries: we have small number of clients and these clients' life cycle is rather short. I propose to create something like migration plan for test suites. If test suite's developers want to switch to new framework during maintenance release they should consult this plan. So we can avoid situations when deprecated API will be used with updated test suite. And even more we can remove legacy code from framework after all products those use it will be EOL'ed. This allows us to save time while creating new features. What do you think?" Patrick Wright makes the case for non-hardcore use of SwingX Painters in Re: Painters: default 'cacheable' value. "Just some comments from a potential users of Painters. I think we have to consider two different kinds of users, those who write or extend Painters in serious ways, and those who just want to plug-and-play. I'm in the latter group and what I'd like, 90% of the time, is to add one or more painters and have the performance be pretty good out of the box. This is especially true if I have a bunch of painters used by different components in a panel and don't know where to start addressing performance problems." Bill Batchelor needs help adding a Find in page feature: "I'd like to implement a "Find in page" function in JavaHelp, which brings up a dialog where a user can enter a text string and then it will find that text string in the currently loaded HTML page. Can you advise how easy this is to implement and how to go about it? I have a lot of expereince in Java so I just need to know where to start. This is really needed as the search feature provided in JavaHelp is no good for finding a text string as it just says there are, eg 4 matches and highlights them, but does not take you to them in the HTML page. It the HTML page is 20 pages long, say, it's hard to find the matches!" Current and upcoming Java Events :
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