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.

Homebrew, Ruby, and Git

I encountered some interesting behavior between Homebrew and Ruby this afternoon. I can describe what happened, but I don’t yet understand why. Perhaps another member of the dev community can shed some light.

Upgrading to Git 1.8.5

Earlier today I learned that Git 1.8.5 was available. So I decided to upgrade. Since I use Homebrew for package management, it was time for $ brew doctor and $ brew update as well.

$ brew doctor
Error: Homebrew doesn't know what compiler versions ship with your version
of Xcode (5.0.2). Please `brew update` and if that doesn't help, file
an issue with the output of `brew --config`:
  https://github.com/mxcl/homebrew/issues

Thanks!
Warning: Your Homebrew is outdated.
You haven't updated for at least 24 hours, this is a long time in brewland!
To update Homebrew, run `brew update`.

~/Code/Ruby/apps$ 

$ brew doctor has spoken. Time to update Homebrew.

Amazon's Guerrilla Marketing

Last night’s episode of 60 Minutes featured an interview with Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon. The timing was perfect for Amazon. Black Friday was a few days ago. Cyber Monday is today. Online retailers want to be top-of-mind when people are inclined to spend money.

Amazon’s Surprise: Drones

Bezos unveiled a surprise for interviewer Charlie Rose: Amazon Prime Air, a service that will deliver most Amazon products in thirty minutes or less using a fleet of octocopter drones.