Jadon

My son in an Iron Man Suit!

Enrique — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 13:58:32 -0800

My son loved his Iron Man Suit for Halloween! I added some cool tech! Here’s a video:

Repulsor Air – Blows air with CO2 air pump on hip and hose back to his hand.
Repulsor Missile – Using CO2 air pump can also launch a paper missile.
Repulsor Sensor/Light - A magnetic switch sensor lights his repulsor hand light and fades out and in his glowing eyes. Arduino handles this effect.
Repulsor Sound Effect(s) – Originally not working. Worked around problem by using right-mouse, middle-mouse button and configured Elightenment17 to playback sound effects using Mplayer script. Mouse buttons activated by Arduino Digital output triggered by sensors.
Arc Reactor – A LED night light from Costco embedded in his chest.
BeagleBoard: Powerful Computer – With BeagleBoard already running in JARVUS box on my son’s back need to add other features. Possibilities: Web cam, mobile router with hotspot and a head-mounted display, VoIP, streaming video of Iron Man view.
Arduino: Super Input/Output Board - Handles repulsor effects but can add other sensors to enable even cooler special effects!!

Also, entered suit in Instructables Halloween Contest [here].

We need lots of good luck!

-Enrique

PS: The backside has a JARVUS box with this block diagram.

Originally, unable to activate sound because of missing software link between linux and Arduino serial port. Worked around the problem by using a PS2 mouse embedded into JARVUS. When Arduino has the repulsor sensor activated, Arduino automatically closes the middle-mouse button. The middle-mouse button is then heard by the BeagleBoard Enlightenment17 mouse binding and plays back the repulsor sound.

Iron Man Suit with Tech Block Diagram of JARVUS.

How I Spent My Sunday Night

Christopher Friedt — Sun, 07 Sep 2008 19:47:00 -0700

Wow - Jules has been asleep for a couple of hours now, and I thought I'd write about how I spent my time this sunday night.

Both Erin & I needed to catch up on a little work. My targets were:

* OE (OpenEmbedded) environment for the BeagleBoard
* OE environment for OpenMoko/FreeRunner
* Qemu for the OpenMoko/FreeRunner
* Qemu for my thesis

I'm really only interested in talking about the last point right now though, since that's the only one that's news to me.

My thesis has been very bleeding edge and very 'theoretical' directly from the start - the goal is to design and build a PCI co-processor for accelerated application of geometric algebra. The last attempt ran into a memory bandwidth bottleneck due to the use of shared system SDRAM over the PCI bus (even with DMA the problem cannot be solved). Unfortunately, the last attempt used an externally developed PCI card, and so they couldn't expand on the hardware itself. My solution to the problem was to throw more hardware at it - by designing a card with a sufficient amount of on-board SDRAM and SRAM, I hypothesize that PCI-imposed memory bandwidth limitations can be eliminated.

The board would contain an FPGA with a sufficient number of logic cells / blocks for one or many instances of the GA processor. There would be a high density of SDRAM to facilitate extra storage requirements for image processing, as well as sufficient amounts of SRAM to facilitate the needs of each processor and to act as a first-stage cache to the slower SDRAM.

My current vision of the board is something like the following:

(Insert diagram here - fpga, sdram, sram, optional DSP @ xxx MHz )

It's somewhat similar to the DSP Card by Darrell Harmon, and I plan on using free tools to do the schematic & circuit as well.

Now, there are several problems with PCI:

I only have a vague understanding of the protocol, data format, and timings of the PCI bus
I don't want to spend literally thousands of dollars on a prototype board, or even hundreds on literature describing the PCI bus
I don't want to waste time and money designing, ordering, reflowing, and testing PCI boards from scratch, including PCB layouts, etc. I want to do 1 PCB layout and have it work!!! (a very optimistic goal)
Even if I design a PCI board from scratch and it was electrically flawless, it's worthless if the interface software isn't on the other side (i.e. driver, low-level libraries, application)

Conceptually, I regarded electrical verification and validation as two entirely separate problems. if I could emulate the behaviour correctly, and if the description for that behaviour closely matched that of a physical piece of hardware, then the difficulty of implementing the hardware would be drastically reduced, and even if the hardware failed, I would still have a simulation!

Having used Qemu for a long time, I already knew that many people have written excellent code which performs kernel-level emulation of PCI hardware. So I started writing some C which described the basic functionality of a PCI card, borrowing from other existing modules (rtl8139.c, ne2k.c). After a lot of time spent, I finally got Qemu to initialize my module, which I appropriately called the 'OmniCard'.

However, even if I got the PCI protocol down, I would still be stuck writing C code to 'pretend' to do what each component in the FPGA would do (I'm not really interested in designing a VHDL interpreter). Furthermore, since emulation on a single-pipeline chip is not parallelization, a software simulation wouldn't really cut it for actually accelerating the operations of geometric algebra. Thus, the original goals would not be accomplished, and creating a piece of hardware is absolutely necessary.

Then I read some art-ic-les about using SystemC with Qemu. SystemC is probably the closest thing that I'll be able to get to that's highly integrable for emulation and also very close to the hardware level. Therefore, making a hardware design out of SystemC code is entirely possible. There are already translators that convert SystemC to HDL. The way that SystemC works with Qemu in the above articles is through a built-in PCI bridge. It will take some investigation, but I think that SystemC could be my key to maximizing my design efficiency with full debugability.

Stay tuned for updates.

Linux device IDs faces

(author unknown) — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 21:37:36 -0700

10 Videos About Google

Alex Chitu — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 09:47:00 -0700

Even if Google has been founded 10 years as a company, there aren't too many great videos about Google's history. I compiled a list of 10 videos: interviews with Google's co-founders, press events, an interesting documentary and some highlights from Googleplex.

1. "Charlie Rose" (PBS, July 2001) - a conversation with Larry Page (Google's CEO at that time) and Sergey Brin.

2. "60 Minutes" (CBS, 2005) - transcript. "To this day, Google has still never run a TV commercial. Their popularity has spread literally by word of mouth around the world, as people everywhere search for everything under the sun."

3. "Sergey Brin and Larry Page: Inside the Google machine" (TED conferences, 2004)

4. "Google - Behind the Screen" (Ijsbrand van Veelen, 2006). The documentary asks interesting questions like "How can you convince people that Google isn't a Big Brother company?", "What happens if a search engine becomes dominant?", but the answers from Google's executives aren't always convincing.

5. "Sergey Brin Speaks with UC Berkeley Class" (2005) - 40 minutes about Wikipedia, search engines, China, desktop software and more.

6. "Google Factory Tour" (a press event from 2005) - 340 minutes

7. "Googling the Googlers' DNA: A Demonstration of the 23andMe Personal Genome" (2008). Anne Wojcicki reveals interesting details about Sergey Brin, Larry Page and Eric Schmidt - skip to minute 27.

8. "Marissa Mayer at Stanford University" (2006) - Marissa Mayer's 9 Notions of Innovation

9. "The Science and Art of User Experience at Google" (2006) - Jen Fitzpatrick

10. "Working at Google" (2008) - interviews with Google employees and images from Googleplex.

Ubuntu should not copy the Mac

Dana Blankenhorn — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 06:20:47 -0700

Ubuntu is putting serious investment into improving the interface of its Linux.

Mark Shuttleworth wants Linux to become comparable to the Apple Macintosh, quoting the watchwords of Web 2.0:

Make your site visually appealing,
Do something different and do it very, very well,
Call users to action and give them an immediate, rewarding experience.

Good idea. But the Ubuntu Developer Summit is taking the wrong approach.

It is past time for open source to become truly innovative. The Macintosh interface is a nice point-and-click interface, but that’s all it is.

We need something completely different. How about a high quality voice interface, based on Perlbox? (The graphic above is from Perlbox.org.)

Perlbox already has a KDE interface, and three years of work behind it. It may not be all it can be. What could it be with a few million development dollars?

My friend Lamont Wood has been working with voice recognition technology and says some of it is now ready for prime time. By that he means it can be 95% accurate at 120 words per minute.

True, he was testing a proprietary product, but I am first contemplating an open source voice interface, not a voice-based word processor. The parts to do something ground-breaking appear to be here.

Besides, there are millions of visually-impaired folks, like my mom and my friend Jim Pettigrew, who have been totally left out of the computer revolution until now. Why not bring them in?

If Ubuntu is ready to be truly competitive, then that says to me it’s ready to innovate. And if voice isn’t your favored direction, what is?

DRM Helps Spore Make History as The Most Pirated Game Ever

Corvida — Sat, 13 Sep 2008 11:41:25 -0700

Hosting Large Public Datasets on Amazon S3

Tom White — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 14:00:00 -0700

Update: I just thought of a quick and dirty way of doing this: just store your content on an extra large EC2 instance (holds up to 1690GB) and make the image public. Anyone can access it using their EC2 account, you just get charged for hosting the image.

There's a great deal of interest in large, publicly available datasets (see, for example, this thread from theinfo.org), but for very large datasets it is still expensive to provide the bandwidth to distribute them. Imagine if you could get your hands on the data from a large web crawl, the kind of thing that the Internet Archive produces. I'm sure people would discover some interesting things from it.

Amazon S3 is an obvious choice for storing data for public consumption, but while the cost for storage may be reasonable, the cost for transfer can be crippling since the cost is not under the control of the data provider, being incurred for each transfer (which is initiated by the user).

For example, consider a 1TB dataset. With storage running at $0.15 per GB per month this works out at around $150 per month to host. With transfer costs costing $0.18 per GB, this dataset costs around $180 for each transfer out of Amazon! It's not surprising large datasets are not publicly hosted on S3.

However, transferring data between S3 and EC2 is free, so could we limit transfers from S3 so they are only possible to EC2? You (or anyone else) could run an analysis on EC2 (using Hadoop, say) and only pay for the EC2 time. Or you could transfer it out of EC2 at your own expense. S3 doesn't support this option directly, but it is possible to emulate it with a bit of code.

The idea (suggested by Doug Cutting) is to make objects private on S3 to restrict access generally, then run a proxy on EC2 that is authorized to access the objects. The proxy only accepts connections from within EC2: any client that is outside Amazon's cloud is firewalled out. This combination ensures only EC2 instances can access the S3 objects, thus removing any bandwidth costs.

Implementation

I've written such a proxy. It's a Java servlet that uses the JetS3t library to add the correct Amazon S3 Authorization HTTP header to gain access to the owner's objects on S3. If the proxy is running on the EC2 instance with hostname ec2-67-202-43-67.compute-1.amazonaws.com, for example, then a request for

http://ec2-67-202-43-67.compute-1.amazonaws.com/bucket/object

is proxied to the protected object at

http://s3.amazonaws.com/bucket/object

To ensure that only clients on EC2 can get access to the proxy I set up an EC2 security group (which limits access to port 80):

ec2-add-group ec2-private-subnet -d "Group for all Amazon EC2 instances."
ec2-authorize ec2-private-subnet -p 80 -s 10.0.0.0/8

Then by launching the proxy in this group, only machines on EC2 can connect. (Initially, I thought I had to add public IP addresses to the group -- which, incidentally, I found in this forum posting -- but this is not necessary as the public DNS name of an EC2 instance resolves to the private IP address within EC2.) The AWS credentials to gain access to the S3 objects are passed in the user data, along with the hostname of S3:

ec2-run-instances -k gsg-keypair -g ec2-private-subnet \
-d "<aws_access_key> <aws_secret_key> s3.amazonaws.com" ami-fffd1996

This AMI (ID ami-fffd1996) is publicly available, so anyone can use it by using the commands shown here. (The code is available here, under an Apache 2.0 license, but you don't need this if you only intend to run or use a proxy.)

Demo

Here's a resource on S3 that is protected: http://s3.amazonaws.com/tiling/private.txt. When you try to retrieve it you get an authorization error:

% curl http://s3.amazonaws.com/tiling/private.txt
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<Error>
<Code>AccessDenied</Code>
<Message>Access Denied</Message>
<RequestId>57E370CDDD9FE044</RequestId>
<HostId>dA+9II1dYAjPE5aNsnRxhVoQ5qy3KCa6frkLg3SyTwzP3i2SQNCU534/v8NXXEnN</HostId>
</Error>

With a proxy running, I still can't retrieve the resource via the proxy from outside EC2. It just times out due to the firewall rule:

% curl http://ec2-67-202-56-11.compute-1.amazonaws.com/tiling/private.txt
curl: (7) couldn't connect to host

But it does works from an EC2 machine (any EC2 machine):

% curl http://ec2-67-202-56-11.compute-1.amazonaws.com/tiling/private.txt
secret

Conclusion

By running a proxy on EC2, at 10 cents per hour (small instance) - or $72 a month, you can allow folks using EC2 to access your data on S3 for free. While running the proxy is not free, it is a fixed cost that might be acceptable to some organizations, particularly those that have an interest in making data publicly available (but can't stomach large bandwidth costs).

A few questions:

Is this useful?
Is there a better way of doing it?
Can we have this built into S3 (please, Amazon)?

Beagle at IBC

Jadon — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 08:58:00 -0700

Lot's of activity going on around Beagle, but I've been lax on generating blog posts. In addition to the activity going on in preparation for ESC Boston, such as getting Sugar running, giving free trainings in India, and getting a new intern to watch the IRC logs, we also have our very own Roger Monk and Koen Kooi at IBC today. Stop by (IPTV zone IP322) if you want to take a look at the Beagle in action or simply hop on IRC and chat with them today while they are at the booth and logged into IRC using the Beagle board using nickname "beagle|ibc".

Lego-like Linux modules ready to ship

(author unknown) — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 22:00:00 -0700

Bug Labs will ship its tiny, open-source ARM11-powered BugBase and three add-on modules next week, and will soon switch to Poky Linux. Meanwhile, a recent review finds the hackable Linux-based platform to be intriguing fun for "bleeding edge developers," but too "flaky" for average consumers.

Maemo gains KOffice port

(author unknown) — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 07:13:12 -0700

First $100 laptop runs Linux

(author unknown) — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 07:13:03 -0700

Amazon deal confirmed - Windows XP not included

(Christoph Derndorfer) no_spam@olpcnews.com — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 01:37:42 -0700

Django 1.0 Ships

(author unknown) — Sun, 07 Sep 2008 02:00:00 -0700

DjangoProject announced the general availability of Django 1.0. Django 1.0 includes quite a few features that are new since the 0.96 release that many sites have been using. These include improved Unicode handling, an improved and refactored ORM, cross-site scripting protection, Jython compatability, and more.

The Invisible Browser

Ionut Alex Chitu — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 13:27:00 -0700

Google Chrome has been released and you can now finally try it. Developed in the past two years, the browser is barely noticeable after you open it. It loads faster than Internet Explorer and it has very few buttons and controls.

In fact, Chrome is an ironic name: Google wanted to create a browser that has a minimal chrome (that's how software developers name the menu and the toolbar of an application). The browser replicates the simplicity of Google's homepage that hides the complexity of the search engine.

Even if it's just a beta, Chrome already supports 43 languages and it automatically detects your language. To change the interface language, just click on the wrench button, click Options, select the "Minor tweaks" tab, click on "Change font and language settings", select the "Languages" tab and change Google Chrome language. That's a lot of clicking, but you won't change the UI language too often.

Google's browser merges the address bar and the search box in a single box that provides suggestions from the local history and from Google search. Google suggests queries and web pages that you are likely to visit, so in many cases you'll not even need to perform a search. Of course, you can change your search engine in the Options and Google provides two great alternatives: Yahoo and Live Search (OK, Live Search is not that great). But the great thing is that you don't need to choose a search engine: just browse the web search, visit your favorite sites and Google automatically detects search engines and saves them for you. Try this: go to amazon.com, search for the title of a book and then type amazon in Google's address box. You'll see an entry that allows you to search on amazon.com using Amazon's search engine. Click on the list item or press Tab to access the search engine.

Google automatically creates keywords for sites that have search engines: the automatically generated keyword for Amazon is amazon.com.

Let's say I want to download an application, like the fabulous Opera browser. Instead of being asked if I truly want to download the file, the location from my computer and other pesky details, Google Chrome just downloads it without opening any dialog. A small bar at the bottom of the window shows the progress and the greatest thing is that I can drag the file to any location directly from the browser. You should definitely try this if you install Chrome.

The browser has a modern JavaScript engine designed for improving the performance of complex applications like Gmail. But to make Gmail feel like a true applications, try this: click on the "New" button, select "Create application shortcuts" and a new chromeless window will open. You'll also create a desktop shortcut for Gmail. That's a feature of Google Gears, which is included in the browser.

In Wired's article about Chrome, the engineers that built the V8 JavaScript engine talk about its performance. "We just did some benchmark runs today, Bak says a couple of weeks before the launch. Indeed, V8 processes JavaScript 10 times faster than Firefox or Safari. And how does it compare in those same benchmarks to the market-share leader, Microsoft's IE 7? Fifty-six times faster."

Like Opera 9.5, Google Chrome fully indexes all the web pages you visit and you can find search results from your browsing history in the address bar. To bookmark a page, click on the star icon and you can choose a folder for your bookmark (that's right, folders in an application created by Google). The browsing history, the recently closed tabs and the most visited pages are used to automatically create a homepage. Try this when you install Chrome: create a new tab, resize the window and notice how the thumbnails adjust to the new size. And another tip: go to Options and select "On startup... restore the pages that were last open".

Developers shouldn't a miss menu created especially for them: Control > Developer. They'll find a JavaScript debugger for the new V8 engine, an element inspector that includes some great charts for monitoring the performance of a page and something truly innovative: a task manager for your tabs. Remember this shortcut: Shift+Esc to instantly open the task manager if one of the tabs slows down your browsing. As you probably know, in Chrome (almost) each tab runs in its own process, which can be killed without crashing the browser.

Those who want to find more about memory usage, including a comparison with other browsers that are currently opened, should click on "Stats for nerds" in the task manger or type about:memory in the address bar. Here's a comparison between Chrome 0.2, IE8 Beta 2, Opera 9.52 and Firefox 3.0.1 when only three web pages are loaded after a restart: google.com, yahoo.com and youtube.com.

Google Chrome borrowed many features from other browsers: Opera's speed dial used to show thumbnails of the most frequently visited pages, Safari's inline find feature, Internet Explorer's private browsing mode, Firefox's spell checker. Google hopes that other browsers will borrow features or even code from Chrome. Sergey Brin said that what Google truly wants is a diverse and vibrant ecosystem of browsers and Chrome is just another option.

Google's browser might never become popular, even if it's fast, stable and more secure than other browsers. The most important thing is that Google Chrome will certainly have an impact on the next versions of IE, Firefox, Opera, Safari. Even if you don't have a Gmail account and you use Yahoo Mail or Hotmail, you benefited indirectly from Gmail's breakthroughs. If Gmail is the invisible feature of Yahoo Mail and Hotmail, Google Chrome could be the signal that browsers need to become platforms for web applications.

Related links:
Download Chrome
Chrome help group - useful to report problems or ask questions
Answers to common Google Chrome objections - by Matt Cutts
The secret project to crush IE and remake the Web - Wired
More links

Java Sound & Music Software for Linux, Part 1

(author unknown) — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 09:15:14 -0700

Via frees Chrome graphics driver source

(author unknown) — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 08:00:00 -0700

Via has released an open source Linux "Xorg" driver for its integrated graphics chips. Announced in a blog by open source leader and new Via consultant Harald Welte, the "chrome" driver release follows up on Via's vow to start opening up its chipsets to the open source development community.

XO replacement parts available at ilovemyxo

(Christoph Derndorfer) no_spam@olpcnews.com — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 05:02:20 -0700

Picasa Web Albums Get Face Recognition

Frederic Lardinois — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 11:32:24 -0700

Comparing Web Platforms

Richard MacManus — Sun, 31 Aug 2008 17:45:36 -0700

Pandora is Real!?

(author unknown) — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 22:05:20 -0700

Embest DevKit8000 Evaluation Kit, TI OMAP 3530, ARM Cortex-A8, Embedded Applications

Mon, 06 Jul 2009 05:42:53 -0700

Mozilla CEO: The browser has a long way to go - The H Open Source: News and Features

Sun, 05 Jul 2009 16:54:13 -0700

HTC - Support - Flashing your Android Dev Phone with a Factory System Image

Sat, 04 Jul 2009 15:11:33 -0700

'Pd anywhere' installed on Beagle Board — Florian Hollerweger

Mon, 29 Jun 2009 15:35:10 -0700

Pure Data anywhere running on the BeagleBoard

» Truly First USB Monitor For Laptops

Thu, 25 Jun 2009 10:39:11 -0700

Wolfram|Alpha

Wed, 24 Jun 2009 12:34:18 -0700

Multimedia in your pocket | Gran Canaria Desktop Summit Website

Tue, 23 Jun 2009 07:48:41 -0700

"pitivi, jokosher and buzztard on a omap3 based device (e.g. beagle board running at 500Mhz, Maemo5 as a software stack)"

Dobbs Code Talk - Roll Your Own Hardware, or Dr. Dobb's Does Bug Labs

Tue, 23 Jun 2009 07:34:33 -0700

DealExtreme: $13.83 Rechargeable USB Emergency Power Backup Pack 2400mAh

Mon, 22 Jun 2009 07:22:26 -0700

http://www.flickr.com/photos/koenkooi/3647423176/

Chrome and Firefox 3.5 Memory Usage

Sun, 21 Jun 2009 19:17:16 -0700

Memory usage was one of my biggest issues with Firefox 3.0. It is great to see the project not only get better about memory management, but take the lead among its browser peers.

M-AUDIO - Drivers

Sun, 21 Jun 2009 13:56:28 -0700

YouTube - Tutorial #1.1 - Android on TI Zoom2, build setup, apps install

Wed, 17 Jun 2009 01:20:05 -0700

A Visual Expedition Inside the Linux File Systems - Linux Kernel 2.6.29 + tux3

Tue, 16 Jun 2009 13:43:00 -0700

Kokkini Zita - Linux Audio

Sun, 14 Jun 2009 15:55:37 -0700

Android information from Japan: Android on Beagle Board

Sun, 14 Jun 2009 15:53:44 -0700

Someone in Japan generating a Google Android phone prototype based on the OMAP3530 BeagleBoard. They provide you the details you'd need to make your own or you will probably happily consult for you.