I've been learning a lot about Screencasting this week...
- I've updated my podcasting links at http://delicious.com/dwhawley/podcasting with a couple of new items.
- I reviewed a couple of USB devices to capture video and audio (USB 28000D DVD Maker and the Diamond VC500 One Touch Video Capture Device) and I wasn't happy with any of the reviews. This really seemed to be the simplest avenue but seems to be a dead-end.
- The solution I'm searching for assumes that I'll only have laptops available. There are a lot of video capture cards out there for a desktop machine but I'm avoiding this one for now.
- I like the VNC option the best, but a major problem with this is that we'll need to rely on speakers installing something on their machine. Jason Follas pointed this out to me and he's right. I think the only way to resolve this is ask the community. If they don't like the solution I'll know to keep looking. Besides, someone might have a really good idea.
- Jing is cool. Jay Wren gave me quick demo earlier today and I was impressed with it's simplicity. One of the things that I really like about Jing is it's social spirit. I was looking at Camtasia, another offering by TechSmith , but I think Jing may be a better fit.
I'm the A/V Coordinator for CodeMash 2009 and as such I have a lot of sessions to capture. Here are some notes.
- I'm storing links related to podcasting at http://delicious.com/dwhawley/podcasting.
- According to Wikipedia, "Virtual Network Computing (VNC) is a graphical desktop sharing system which uses the RFB protocol to remotely control another computer. It transmits the keyboard and mouse events from one computer to another, relaying the graphical screen updates back in the other direction, over a network." In short, the VNC server displays what's on the screen of the VNC client.
- Every presenter will require a VNC client of some sort on their machine. The client will connect to a VNC server where the actual video capturing will take place. I'm assuming one server per client with each hard-wired to a switch, but I'm hoping for more 2 or more clients per server.
- Without knowing much about it, I had been using VNC for quite some time. I've used both GoToMeeting and NetMeeting with excellent results.
- Because this is CodeMash, there will be three different families of Operating Systems represented: Windows, Mac and Linux. Theoretically, my Windows based VNC Server should have no problems seeing a Linux- or Mac-based client, but I've heard this sort of thing before. I will be setting up a test network in the very near future.
- Audio will have to be recorded separately since it isn't part of the RFB spec (communications protocol between VNC client and server). I know some tools cover this for you, but I can't count on it in platform agnostic environment.
I haven't been blogging much lately, which is no surprise to anyone who follows my blog. To those three readers, I'd like to tell you that writing - to me - is a very much a love/hate relationship. When I'm inspired, writing becomes an obsession I can't possibly put aside. Even if what I produce is not noteworthy among my colleagues, the process of putting my thoughts into words helps me clarify personal thoughts like no other learning experience could. It confirms truths. It tears-down misconceptions. It's the highest form of human expression. It's REALLY exhausting. So If I don't have the time or energy to write, how do I effectively maintain a blog?
The title of this post sums up my solution. If I don't have the time or energy to write the kind of post I want, just write short bullet points on the things that I've been exploring. What I really like about this approach is that I do a lot more in the course of a day than I could possibly convey through my blog. For example, since I last blogged, I've experimented with jQuery, VMWare Player, Virtual PC, Python and SQL Alchemy. Even at the best of times, there is no way that I'm going to cover all of those topics before forgetting one or more of them. With that said, time to write some notes.
- jQuery rules, though I've had problems debugging using FireBug. Apparently it requires a bookmarklet though that still doesn't seem to work for me.
- The mapper class in SQL Alchemy - Python ORM - gets rid of having to manually set properties of derived classes when the corresponding base class is already known (i.e., Employee.Name = Person.Name). This is the sort of code that really annoys me and I'm glad there's a way to avoid it.
- Virtualization rocks, but it gets tough on a laptop. My host machine is Vista and my guests are all XP. I've tried Vista as guest before, but it was so slow I couldn't really do anything with it. Some of my virtualization links can be found at http://delicious.com/dwhawley/virtual.
- I've been using both VMWare Player and Virtual PC. VMWare Player works with more than just Windows allowing me to periodically play with Linux, but doesn't have the really cool pause feature that Virtual PC has. Virtual PC seems a bit snappier to me, but it lacks support for USB. No excuses for that.
- Azure is really cool though you should keep in mind that this is in direct competition with Google Apps. Either way, I'll be using both.
- Of all of the features I've heard about Windows 7, I'm most excited about it's smaller footprint.