Henry Ford's Faster Horse

If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have asked for a faster horse.

~Henry Ford

The above Henry Ford quote is often cited in presentations about innovation. The point of the quote: An inventor who listens to customers too closely, without observing customer behavior, will reap tiny improvements at best. Ford ignored the request for “a faster horse”, and that is how the Ford Motor Company became a leader in the early auto industry.

That’s one way to interpret Ford’s quote. Last night, I was introduced to another view.

BeagleBone Black Running Ubuntu: Part2 (Plus Ruby on Rails)

Part one of this series shows how to install Ubuntu on the BeagleBone Black. We used a MacBook Pro to burn an Ubuntu disk image onto an SD card, and then we booted a BeagleBone Black from the image we created.

This post, part two, covers the installation of the Ubuntu GUI, Ruby, and Rails. All of the commands in this article are run on the BeagleBone Black.

Node.js bonus: Rails requires a JavaScript runtime, and Node.js offered the quickest way to fulfill this requirement. Details appear within.

Gotcha: Partition Size

At the end of part one, we successfully booted the Bone with the Ubuntu command line interface. Now it’s time to add the GUI. Two things to know about the Ubuntu GUI installation…

BeagleBone Black Running Ubuntu: Part1

The above screenshot shows a BeagleBone Black running Ubuntu, Ruby, and Rails. Why Ubuntu? The Bone comes pre-installed with Ångström, and it boots as soon as you unbox it. Why not stick with Ångström?

My opinion: The factory standard is fine, but it’s always good to have options. Here’s why I decided to try Ubuntu on the BeagleBone Black…

Disposable Electronics in Wired Magazine

What can we build with disposable electronics? An ad in the January 2014 issue of Wired Magazine lets the reader change the color of a Moto X smartphone by pressing a colored circle on the page. This 20-second video shows the ad in operation followed by a glimpse of the inner workings.

High Performance Computing at ACM

Anyone can build a fast CPU. The trick is to build a fast system.  
~ Seymour Cray

The Chicago chapter of the Association for Computing Machinery (Chicago ACM) hosted a lecture titled Supercomputing and You yesterday evening. The talk was delivered by Sharan Kalwani of Fermilab. Kalwani’s background blends mechanical engineering and computer science with decades of high performance computing experience.

10x => High Performance Computing

Kalwani began his talk by drawing a distinction between supercomputing and high performance computing (HPC). Supercomputing is the buzzword that everyone knows, but the word implies that the designers are focused only on improving CPU performance. Such narrow focus could cause us to ignore important subsystems. For example, if engineers focus strictly on CPU performance, applications that are CPU-bound will quickly encounter I/O bottlenecks. High performance computing takes the entire system into account: CPU, I/O, cache, memory… anything that can influence performance.