Pin ItSynopsis: The Arduino is a good example of how open source thinking can spur innovation and variation in hardware, firmware, and application design (open source autopilots, for example.) I haven’t seen a catalog of Arduino hardware evolution anywhere on the net, so I thought I’d take a crack at one to show you how [...]
Read More »Pin ItThe Great Ubuntu-Girlfriend Experiment has been making the rounds and has been quite amusing from many angles. Ironically, I received this email from my Mom a few minutes ago: "I keep getting a notice on the screen that I should install the latest version of Flash. Seems like nothing is working right this morning [...]
Read More »Pin ItRuby is a great programming language for many purposes, however, it's weak when it comes to device support for embedded projects. That said, one package that helps bridge the gap is the Ruby-SerialPort which, as its name implies, provides the classes needed to access a system's serial port from Ruby. Ruby SerialPort works very [...]
Read More »Pin It MacFUSE is one of those packages I always knew I needed but didn't know it existed or even what to call it. MacFUSE lets Mac OS X treat a remote ssh accessible server as a mounted disk resource. Upshot: I can use any of my Mac OS X tools directly on a file [...]
Read More »Pin ItThere's an interesting article on the Discover magazine website called "Long Live Closed-Source Software" written by Jaron Lanier. Jaron is a colleague of Richard Stallman though they are philosophically opposed. A quick summary of his thesis is that though the trendy thinking in synthetic biology includes incorporating the worldwide collaboration ideas (aka web 2.0 [...]
Read More »Pin ItI was thinking the other day about software that I use every day but is unobtrusive….so much so that I forget I'm using it. Besides the normal embedded software in consumer devices, one of the first packages that came to mind was DenyHosts. DenyHosts is a Python script and system which effectively stops brute [...]
Read More »Pin ItRecently, an odd set of coincidences made me wonder if, as a society, we’ve gone over the line in technology dependence. Item 1) A Quiznos sandwich store was getting ready to set up shop in the lobby of the OpenLogic building. Signs announcing its arrival met every entrant. A huge, heavily bolted Quiznos kiosk [...]
Read More »Pin ItMost people who work with me know I'm not a big fan of Eclipse though I do use it from time to time for typical Java tasks. I also used it several years ago with CDT to do C++ development for some GIS projection code and it worked well for that task. Recently, I [...]
Read More »Pin It Given all the interest in wind energy these days, and the fact that I live in a very windy area, I decided to start measuring wind speed and direction. I found some inexpensive, robust wind instruments, a cheap AVR microcontroller, and set out to build the firmware using an open source C compiler, [...]
Read More »Pin ItBackground In this article, I'm going to take you on a quick tour for configuring virtual hosts on apache, but then leave you with the one tip that glues it all together. Normally if you're hosting a web site on Linux/Apache, your ISP is handling all this for you, but if you're like me [...]
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