March 13, 2009 by tmalaher.

The presentation went well, the Elluminate software worked just fine. People reported good audio quality, and the features like “raise hand” and the chat window allowed for questions to be asked and answered during the presentation.

The screen sharing seemed to behave as expected.

I’ve made the presentation slides available for dowload: Cloud Computing Presentation to CJUG March 2009

A recording of the actual presentation is available at CJUG’s web site.

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March 9, 2009 by tmalaher.

I’ll be giving a presentation on Cloud Computing at the Calgary Java Users Group meeting on March 11, 2009 at 5pm MDT.

What is Cloud Computing? Every vendor seems to define it differently.

Last month’s CJUG speaker (Nikita Ivanov from GridGain) talked about how to more easily use cloud computing resources for grid computing. Of course he gave his own definition of Cloud computing…

But let’s step back a moment and try to figure out what cloud computing is all about.

This talk will survey the landscape (cloudscape?), try to define cloud computing, where it might be used, and demo some actual Java code running on one of the more mature offerings in a newborn industry: Amazon Web Services or AWS.

The presentation will actually be Virtual, using screen-sharing/conferencing software from Elluminate. If you’d like to attend, I suggest you visit the Elluminate First Time Users page to ensure your computer is configured correctly ahead of time. Be sure to go to the “Configuration Room” to set up your audio.

Note: For those of you behind corporate firewalls that need to use a proxy server, I did have some difficulty with this initially, but following these instructions: Proxy use with Elluminate Live, I was able to get it working. Specifically, I set my Java to use a hard-coded proxy server, and then when I ran the application, it still could not connect, and I then used the instructions in Step 3 (Manual proxy settings), after which things worked fine.

To quote from the CJUG page:

To join the meeting, click on this link. The Elluminate Live! software will download and run via Web Start - make sure you have Java (preferably 5 or 6) installed and allow a few minutes for a download of approximately 15Mb. You can join the meeting any time from 4.45PM onwards.

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March 5, 2009 by tmalaher.

• BZ's '07 San Francisco Fleetweek Photo Gallery
  (tags: aircraft airplane military photography aviation blueangles photos sonicboom fleetweek shockwave transsonic)

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