Late Night Hacking

Since my wife decided to spend the evening cleaning out the bedroom closet, using the bed as buffer space for old clothes and other detritus, I HAD TO stay up and play with my RPi some more.   Since I have guests sleeping in my office, I set about doing some remote hacking from upstairs.

I moved a few steps closer to making the PI more useful:

• Without any additional configuration, I used SSH to login to the Pi from my upstairs desk.  Most excellent that no additional messing about was necessary
• Used apt-get to update the distro and installed PHP5, Apache, vsftpd and a few other tidbits.  Started playing with building content – totally standard Apache configuration.  Again, the CL tools are easier to use than the utilities included in Raspian.
• Discovered that I can’t address the RPi using local DNS (.local addresses), but both the Ethernet and WiFi interfaces (10.0.0.x) serve just fine.   Tried pinging a variety of clients using the .local syntax.  Some resolve, some don’t.  Need to grok this issue in fullness.

 What to do Next?

So, I have a very cute and reasonably powerful ARM-based system to play with.  I don’t want it to just sit on the shelf next to my MIPS-based ShivaPlug, so I am mulling over some real-world applications for it:

• Use it as a caching/loop storage server for IP cameras I originally installed to watch our puppies from Hawaii
• Build a home-brewed smart thermostat – think Nest with wires hanging out
• Experiment with Lua (very doable, even if the RPi community is focused on Python), among other things to diddle the bits on the GPIO port
• Use it to learn Python
• Employ the RPi to teach my younger daughter about embedded systems, web programming, etc.

Other suggestions welcome!

Incidentally, I backed Karl Lattimer’s HotPi project on Kickstarter.  I plan to have fun with the HotPi daughterboard once it arrives – it’ll help with the Nest clone project.

RaspberryPi.local – Avahi Daemon!

Without even meaning to, I tripped over a useful blog post by Matt Richardson – 10 Tips for New Raspberry Pi Owners.  To enable local DNS-style naming of my RPi (raspberrypi.local), I needed to install the Avahi Daemon.   Impressive dependency set – bless apt-get.  Worked immediately.

Guest Blog for Black Duck Software

Part II

In earlier blog posts, I examined five areas challenging Android development (Android Cat Herding – Part I).  In this blog, I discuss two solutions to address them.

SPDX

The first is SPDX – the emerging Software Package Data Exchange, part of the Linux Foundation’s Open Compliance Program.  SPDX has a charter to

create a set of data exchange standards that enable companies and organizations to share component information (metadata) for software packages and related content with the aim of facilitating license and other policy compliance.

building on a specification defined as

a standard format for communicating the components, licenses and copyrights associated with a software package. An SPDX file is associated with a particular software package and contains information about that package in the SPDX format.

Read More . . .

Guest Blog for Black Duck Software

Part 1 – Hidden Complexity

This week Android application developers from around the world are gathering in San Mateo at AnDevCon – the Android Developers Conference. While they are soaking up tutorials on UI haptics and building apps with Ruby and HTML5, I find myself pondering the particulars of the Android platform.

A quick glance at the conference curriculum (and Gingerbread documentation) reveals Android as ever more resource-rich, with a growing repertoire of APIs and capabilities to leverage emerging hardware (like the barometer on the Motorola XOOM) and to meet developer community requirements.  In providing the underpinnings for its burgeoning app portfolio (approaching 300,000 – AndroLib.com), Google and its Open Handset Alliance (OHA) partners have created an increasingly complex mobile applications platform.

A Daunting Integration Task

The underlying complexity of Android platform code can be daunting to developers, especially to software teams at chipset suppliers, device manufacturers (OEMs) and integrators.   Anyone needing to integrate Android platform code with hardware and system software will be concerned about

• Managing the 165 different packages that comprise the Android GIT repository
• Tracking changes in over 80,000 source code files
• Integrating Android internal system code, device drivers, Dalvik code, middleware and applications with myriad external repositories
• Maintaining, integrating and QAing company-specific additions to the platform (e.g., UI customizations and Dalvik performance enhancements)
• Reconciling the rights and obligations represented in at least 19 different licenses
• Repeating this exercise every 3-4 months (hello Gingerbread and Android 3.0!)

Read more . . .