A few weeks ago, I found this beautiful video on Youtube – a timelapse video of stars and the Milky Way. Seeing the stars appear to rotate overhead (due to the rotation of the Earth) and the intricate structure of our own galaxy gave me a profound feeling of the scale of the universe that we move through on spaceship Earth.
Raspberry Pi webcam; a gentle intro to crontab
Here’s a quick and easy first project for new Raspberry Pi owners - turn your Pi into a webcam, and learn about Linux’s ability to run repeated tasks at scheduled intervals with the cron utility.
My bacon talk
The awesome folks over at devslovebacon have made my talk available on youtube. It’s a pretty good quality recording, hope you enjoy it.
Living in the future
Paul Graham’s latest essay - How to get startup ideas - is a great read. I was struck by the Bucheit/Pirsig conjecture: “Live in the future, then build what’s missing.” and the following paragraph regarding ideas that come out of folks’ experience at college.
Parsing huge XML files with go
I’ve recently been messing around with the XML dumps of Wikipedia. These are pretty huge XML files - for instance the most recent revision is 36G when uncompressed. That’s a lot of XML!
Hands on with Raspberry Pi
I was extremely fortunate to get access to a Raspberry Pi alpha board for the past couple of weeks. For those of you who haven’t already heard about it, the Raspberry Pi project was started to provide a tiny computer for kids to learn to program.
One nanosecond is to one second as one second is to 31.7 years
Peter Burns wrote a great post earlier last week about timescales as they might be “perceived” by a computer’s CPU… “your CPU lives by the nanosecond” [and humans live by the second].
how I built a self driving RC car and you can too
Recently, I have been refreshing my knowledge of Machine Learning by taking Andrew Ng’s excellent Stanford Machine Learning course online. The lecture module on Neural Networks ends with an intriging motivating video of the ALVINN autonomous car driving itself along normal roads at CMU in the mid 90s.
unhumanize.py is a simple python library to convert humanized time intervals into timedeltas
https://github.com/dps/unhumanize
Why mobile apps suck when you're mobile
In 2011, Smartphones are ubiquitous and everyone and his dog is writing mobile apps, but using apps when you're not in range of a fixed wifi hotspot or standing still in an urban area is often extremely frustrating.