LinuxBarbados is Global

LinuxBarbados is a user group for open source enthusiasts. The group meets monthly, offering solid knowledge for anyone who wants to ramp up their open source skills. For example, yesterday’s meeting featured a presentation on XBMC by Michael Layne. The presenter dug deep into the tool, offering tips on how to write plugins in C++ or Python.

CloudCamp Chicago: Developer Night

CohesiveFT hosted a CloudCamp Developer Night this week. Speakers were Philip Szalwinski of 8th Light, John Downey of Braintree, Marcy Capron of Polymathic, and me. My presentation, Citizen Science With OpenROV, was based on the blog post of the same name.

Thank you Margaret Walker for running a great event. Slides appear below.

RVM and Parallella: What a Difference a Shell Makes

RVM is an effective way to manage Ruby versions on Linux or OS X. RVM was working well on my Ubuntu-based Parallella, until one day it stopped:

linaro-nano:~> rvm list
rvm: Command not found.
linaro-nano:~>

rvm: Command not found. Fortunately, Zach Briggs and I were pairing at a joint OpenHack - ChicagoRuby event when the problem occurred. Zach is an ideal pairing partner; troubleshooting was smooth because he was there. Time to investigate.

Parallella Quick Start Guide (with gotchas)

Update: Here’s a 25-minute video intro to Parallella.

Parallella is a single-board supercomputer smaller than a deck of cards. While today’s fastest laptops contain four processor cores, Parallella has eighteen (2 ARM cores plus an Epiphany chip with 16 RISC cores). The maker of Parallella, Adapteva, is on a mission to democratize parallel computing. The company’s tag line is Supercomputing for Everyone.

Node.js Prep for OpenROV

OpenROV is an underwater robot controlled through a web browser. The server-side of the web app is written in Node.js, running on a BeagleBone Black inside the OpenROV.

You don’t need to know Node.js in order to pilot an OpenROV. And you don’t need to do anything in this article to construct an OpenROV from a kit. But if you’re the kind of maker who likes to dig deep into a project, you might enjoy exploring Node.js.