I have a new lease car. Like many other people, I have to go through the traffic jams that block up the highways here in the Netherlands every morning and every evening.I often listen to the radio while I’m in the car. The CD player in my new car has written “mp3″ on it with small letters - it can play MP3 files from CD-ROMs. This gave me an idea: I should find out how podcasting works, I could find some interesting podcasts, put them on a CD and listen to them while I’m in the car.
Podcasting works with RSS news feeds. The news messages in the RSS feed contain links to audio files. You can use a program like Juice to subscribe to RSS feeds and download the audio files, which you can then listen to on your computer, put on your MP3 player or on a CD.
So now I wanted to find some interesting podcasts. This article on O’Reilly’s OnJava website has links to some podcasts about Java.
So far I’ve downloaded a few of the podcasts from Java Posse (RSS podcast feed). There were a few interesting interviews, one with the product manager of Google who is responsible for the Google Web Toolkit, and one with some of the guys on the Swing team at Sun. They were talking about Aerith, a cool Swing demo program that they showed on JavaOne to demonstrate that you can make great looking applications with Swing (although it wasn’t easy to make a program like Aerith).
EclipseZone currently has a series of podcasts about the Eclipse Callisto release - it’s a series of ten podcasts, in which they’re interviewing people from each of the ten projects that are in Callisto.
If you know any other interesting podcasts, let me know!
July 12th, 2006 at 11:18 am
I like those:
Software engineering radio (germans speaking english)
Frank Westphal, Extreme programmer (in german, don’t know about you, but not few people in the Netherlands understand german)
July 13th, 2006 at 10:13 am
For those who do not like juice, here’s a list of alternative podcast clients.
Furthermore, here are two podcast that might be of any interest:
From ajaxian (guess what, all about ajax).
And from IBM’s developer works.
July 26th, 2006 at 9:18 pm
Thanks for the links. Another podcast I like, although it’s not Java related, is This Week in Science.
I discovered that Juice has a bug that prevents it from downloading some podcasts (very annoying) - if the URL looks a bit strange, it tries to save the podcast with an illegal filename…
So I tried jPodder instead, it looks nice but has severe show stopping bugs (at least the 1.1 RC version I tried). It runs the first time after installing it, but the second time it doesn’t start. I have to delete my settings directory, otherwise it won’t start (because it can’t find a library)…
So, I’m still looking for a podcast program that does work. I’ll look through the list that Okke mentioned.
November 16th, 2006 at 3:55 am
I use to listen (among others that you mentioned) from a great podcast site, it is more about Software Architecture. It is called “ARCast with Rob Jacobs”: http://channel9.msdn.com/shows/ARCast_with_Ron_Jacobs
(because it is sponsored by MS)
We can learn many things about architecture and java listening podcast from the dark side, I mean, MS
I have to mention that the sound quality is great.