Hier ein kleiner Film zur Einstimmung. Bitte kommentieren, ob der Film tut oder ob es Probleme gibt...

1. Direkter Link zum Stream. Kann z.B. in VLC abgespielt werden. rtsp://media.gonium.net/Webmontag-Anreise.mp4
2. Musik: Foolcut, Bar. Video: Mathias. Bild oben: monkeyc.net
3. Ja. So sieht mein erstes Experiment in Sachen Video aus. Die beiden Empfangsleute von einem anderen Seminar wurden vorher nicht eingeweiht.

We will stream the upcoming Webmontag in Kaiserslautern live. I work hard on it – here are the lessons I’ve learned so far.

1. There are lots of streaming servers available – but if you want to avoid the WMV file format and still want to have professional tools, you end up with the Quicktime Streaming Server. There is an open source version called Darwin Streaming Server which I use now.
2. It is easy to create a video and upload it to Youtube or whatever service you like. But streaming live video requires a lot more hard- and software. We will use a DV camera and the Quicktime Broadcaster (free download) in order to stream the Webmontag.
3. If you go for live streaming, you’ll have to use the RTSP protocol. Beware: You definitely need a server running over HTTP. The default UDP crap doesn’t work in usual settings. This is a big thing since you need to have a public IP with port 80 free. I am lucky to have some spare IPs with our shiny new rootserver.
4. Don’t use Quicktime for movie encoding – you end up with trouble if someone doesn’t use Quicktime (e.g. Linux people). Instead, stick to plain MP4. You can use Quicktime for playback, but VLC also works.
5. You need to hint the movie – add some tags to it to allow jumping around in the movie. Your Mac tooling will do that if you check the options.
6. If you want to embed your movie into a web page, use the javascript provided by Apple to create the HTML. Otherwise, you’ll be in browser compatibility hell.
7. If you embed the movie in a wordpress blog: make sure to install the TextControl plugin and disable the text mangling functionality of wordpress. Otherwise, the script tags will get destroyed and you see nothing.
8. This is my first experiment with video streaming – anything may go wrong. Stay tuned.

I think it is time to wrap up my experiences regarding presentations. Now, I investigted how I do presentations for almost 5 months, I have given a lot of presentations and used the opportunities to experiment a little. Now, being at a conference and seeing a lot of presentations, it almost hurts.

The picture above shows the average computer science conference powerpoint deck. Actually, the talk was really interesting and good, but the powerpoint slides were just useless. Please, get away from using bullet lists and putting a lot of text on slides. Of course, you can break the rule if it helps your talk. Think of giving a talk, and the slides are just the background that may help you – or not.

Use pictures. Not only diagrams, but real pictures. Get them from Flickr or iStockPhoto. Tell a story. Even if you are just explaining technical details, you can use an example to illustrate it. And connect your story to pictures. If you talk about the EGEE project, you can use very impressive pictures of particle accelerators, etc. Avoid templates. After the first conference day, no one can stand them any more. This is especially true for GGF slides, e.g. the IP policy slide.

My fear was that my presentation doesn’t look reputable. But this isn’t true – you must make sure you know what you’re talking about, and foster discussions whenever possible. You audience will appreciate your efforts.

This GGF, I really feel the schizophrenic nature of standardization work:

1. As a student, I have to throw away all cool features of my scheduler. Ouch. It hurts.
2. As co-chair of the OGSA-RSS Working Group (Open Grid Services Architecture – Resource Selection Services), I have to go for a simple interface that can be mapped to a lot of projects.

I feel that I have to think about it for a time until I’ll be happy with it.

I’m on the road again, towards Athens for GGF 16. Two scandals so far:

1. Lufthansa has stopped giving you metal cutlery. I can’t believe it.
2. Global Grid Forum and Enterprise Grid Alliance will merge.

Lufthansa now gives you those stupid plastic spoons etc. that tend to break during your meal. This sucks.

I don’t yet know what to think about the GGF-EGA merger: On one hand, it may be a good thing to join the forces of the two organizations in order to move to standardization. On the other hand, there will be more industry people arround and I am concerned that scientists will not be able to allocate the same amount of resources for their contribution to the standardization process.

I am also wondering why the news are not on the websites so far. I received a public email, so I think it is safe to write about it.