The Pi Is Chilling
This coming week should see the delivery of the extra pieces that I ordered for the PI. I’m getting a 7-port powered USB hub, an HDMI to DVI cable, a case, and some heat sinks.
I don’t actually need any of this stuff, but I want them to simplify my computer set-up. The board arrived with everything necessary to get the system up and running except the software, and that was easy to download.
I bought a plastic soap dish, and could have easily cut out the necessary holes to use it as a case, but I was concerned about air flow and cooling. If I really like playing with the Pi I will probably buy or build another case later, but I didn’t want to go overboard.
Update: A place to check before you buy anything – Raspberry Pi Verified Peripherals
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speaking of distractions, i did spend too much time reading the parts of ‘raspberry pi for dummies’ that are online, chiefly to try to figure out how many accessories i was going to end up either wanting or needing. and then i wandered off into the weeds, browsing the raspberry pi website, and the reddit thread on what people are doing with theirs, and…
my favorite: http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/1f607z/owners_of_a_raspberry_pi_what_do_you_use_it_for/ca78krc
using one to run your automatic watering system for your tomato plants is a good idea to…
Ouch, you reminded me that I had better get some water on the flowers out front before they all die. They have been saying thunderstorms for a week, but we still haven’t seen any.
I received all of the extra bits today, but I have to get a handle on the fleas before I go crawling around to relocate cables and such.
mine have given up the ghost. i kept believing the forecasts of thunderstorms.
You guy’s can have our rain! I think our *drought* is well and truly over! Been raining here almost a whole week! Sheesh.
And Bryan… I am *almost* envious… 😉 Just so ya know! 😛 😆
Oh hey… I remembered we were talking about fonts ages ago, and I am into the *Font* phase of my project now (which kinda jogged my memory). Anyhow, I was looking for some *fun* fonts and Dingbats to use and discovered that amongst my 100k worth of *PAID* for fonts… I don’t really have that many just plain fun ones (though there are plenty that claim to be so)! I have lot’s of cool, cute, clean, professional, standard, old fashioned… etc, etc, but not many fun! SO… I went-a-lookin! 😀 You might like these (and you hipparchia and anyone else) if you are looking for some just fun fonts (and they are FREE! Though a donation wouldn’t go astray. I donated $20).
Iconian Fonts
(Check out the Dingbats also, and the alphabets — ‘a’ has some cool Action Man/Woman fonts for eg.) 😀
This site has a lot of fun fonts, unsurprising as they were mostly created by a Comic artist/writer. 😉 😀 It’s roughly 50% free, 50% pay. Worth a look:
BLAMBOT Fonts
I wasn’t sure about this one, it is a large font resource (free & paid), and does have a collection of fun fonts, but many border on *cute* rather than fun. 😉 Still…
Fontspace – Fun Fonts
Enjoy! 😀
All out rain has gone to flood the Mississippi Valley, but the big problem here and OZ is that you can’t plan. The critters that farmers send to Congress may not believe in climate change, but the farmers do, because they have seen it, and they are dealing with it. I hope your aquifers are being recharged, Kryten, because outs aren’t, even with the flooding because it comes at the wrong time in the wrong places.
I just want to test out the Pi as a computer before I start doing any breadboarding using the IO port. It is a bit weird to be using a computer that is significantly lighter than a USB cable.
Hehe… It’s funny actually. 😀 Here you are doing what I used to do on my old BBC B+ 😆 What’s that saying… What’s old is new again. 😉 😀
*sigh* I really miss my Beeb! 🙁
I’ve been playing was BASIC on here for a bit of down-time fun. 😉 I found a couple of my old folders with some BASIC code I wrote years ago. I was curious to see how it works today. 🙂 I wasn’t sure which BASIC to use, so I’m trying several. Kbasic, MiniBASIC, PowerBASIC, PureBASIC, RapidBasic & REALbasic! Almost all of them are compilers (creating either DLL lib’s or EXE’s.)
MiniBASIC is small and fast, and has a decent GUI library, but when I went to reg and see what other lib’s they had… The URL went to a ‘Domain Expired’ page. Doesn’t bode well. 😐
PowerBASIC seems to be the most powerful (no pun intended… really!) 😉 ahem… so far! Heck… I may actually buy it and use it instead of C++ that I was going to use to do a couple Win app’s I have in mind! As well as compiling very small EXE’s or DLL’s (smaller than MiniBASIC even), it’s fully multi-threaded and supports creating mt code, includes a full RegEx library accessible within the BASIC code, has full Network (TCP & UDP) and uni- or bi-directional comm’s support (via Serial or USB), supports Unicode, has a bunch of predefined Meta-statements & methods to cut down the required code and many more are available, comes with a full IDE and Debugger (both code & runtime). It also has an inline Assembler. Cool! 😀
PureBASIC looks interesting. It’s available for Win, Linux & OS-X. I haven’t tried it yet, it’s next. 🙂 One of the many differences from the others is that as well as Intel (x86, x64) code, it also supports 680×0 & Power PC syntax including the inline Assembler. It appears (from reading the Manual), that it has the most powerful IDE of all of them, and it’s fully customizable (the others aren’t really so far as I can see). One thing that makes it stand out, is that it has a very large Library for just about everything imaginable! full 2D & 3D graphics (3D via the opensource OGRE engine used in many Indi games. Animation, hardware control (you name it, KB, mouse, camera, CD, joystick (2D or 3D), pad’s… etc, etc!) Full RegEx & Scintilla, XML, SQL, multi-threading… the list is long!
Gonna take me awhile to get into that one! I’m looking forward to it! 😉
I play with these when I need to get away from the main projects for awhile, and I don’t feel like reading a novel or watching a vid etc. 🙂
Have fun with your new toy Bryan! 😀
‘A change is as good as a holiday’ (so *they* say anyway). 😉
They guys who created the Pi considered it the as a BBC C+, a continuation of the concept of the machine that drew them into computer science and programming.
This is like getting back to my roots on the early hardware, when you were expected to actually do some work to get things to run, not just turn it on. Now all I need is a solid win against the fleas, so I can play in peace.
I’m involved in a massive Java/Spring/Hibernate/Groovy/Grails project right now, so I am envious of both of you. The overly complex pile of code that I just mentioned (not our app, but J/S/H/G/G) is the most deranged pile of garbage that I’ve ever encountered. Between random Java 7 differences (such as breaking up SSL packets into tiny chunks, which sends all sorts of servers into a tizzy and kills performance) and the fact that the GORM (a layer over Hibernate) is deranged and decides to flush objects at random times and throws exceptions at random times when its decisions conflict with a query, it’s enough to make a penguin pull his feathers out. I had to actually read the Java SSL library source code to figure out why Java 7 killed my SSL, because it wasn’t documented as one of the changes between Java 6 and Java 7. Really.
I pine for the days when I wrote my own ORM in Python in a *week* and knew every byte of its code and could just focus on my application rather than bull***t. Now I know why every Java/Spring/Hibernate project that I’ve ever encountered comes in late and over budget. What a pile of cr*p.
There is nothing in the trade worse than trying to figure out the logic of someone else’s code, and the problem is geometrically worse for code created by multiple teams. One of my major cautions when people started the big push for OOP, was that it was only as good as the worst written Object. I know it can save a lot of time, but it is still faith-based programming – you have to believe that the objects are all error free.
You would think that Oracle/Sun would have better version control, but they were reacting to a security problem and probably rushed patches without documenting what was done. Many an atrocity has been perpetrated in the push out the door.
I wish I had a dollar for every call I made to a software vendor that went: me – ‘You claimed that your software would do this!’ them – “Yeah, but we never dreamed that anyone would actually want to, so we didn’t really test it all that much.” No need to go into the maximum number of records claims that were based on two byte records.
Good luck. I found that buying cheap dolls to use as effigies of the original coders to stick pins into often helped. That should appeal to your Louisiana roots.
It’s too weird you mentioning Louisiana! I had a very good Cajun Chicken & Deep Fried Shrimp for dinner! A friend gave me a nice surprise and took me to a Restaurant on wheels that travels around Melbourne. (It was about a 2hr drive from here). You have to book well ahead if you want a table inside this massive converted busliner, or you can get a take away meal. My friend planned this some time ago, and we had a table. 😀 The food was fantastic and I loved it! It’s been a long time since I’d enjoyed this style of cooking. Will definitely go again! 😀
Gumbo Kitchen
Yeah, been there too Badtux. Good luck m8!
That reminds me of an *actual* (made from bricks and no wheels, well on the outside that is! Plenty of them inside!) LOL Couldn’t remember the name, but I remembered where it was, so was easy to find. 🙂 They do Cajun/Creole, Soul, American & Canadian cuisine and I remember it fondly. Went there a several time when I lived in Melb. It opened in the mid 90’s from memory. 🙂 It’s called ‘Highway 31’.
Check out the pic gallery. 😀
Highway 31, Brunswick
They are getting their own website (finally!) But the only page working so far is their gig’s list! LOL
Gigs at Highway 31
Think I’ll talk my friend into a few more trips to Melb! 😀 😉 I could do with a decent break. 🙂
The thing about New Orleans is that people go for the music and/or the food and stay for the decadence. They know how to party.
Pretty much anywhere in South Louisiana, just look for the run down barn looking place with the long line of pickup trucks parked outside and you’ll have the best food of your life every time. Kryten, you may have enjoyed your meal. But you can’t get the ingredients there in Australia to make it real. I can’t get them out here in California, for that matter… I have substitutes that are *almost* right, such as spicy Portuguese sausage that is *almost* the same as real genuine Louisiana andouille (which, BTW, is made from pigs slaughtered a few days before, is smoked in a real smokehouse rather than cured with chemicals, and is *not* exported outside of Louisiana since it is not USDA-approved, the Chef Whatshisname “andouille” is close, but isn’t the real thing), but all I can do is get close, not get real. And don’t get me started on tasso. You can’t get real tasso *anywhere* outside of Louisiana, and pretty much every bean-related dish needs a hunk of tasso to taste real. I gave up on trying to find a substitute for tasso, there just isn’t one that I can find out here, I just go with the beans and use a more varied set of spices to try to fill the holes that tasso would fill.
Bryan, the hilarious thing is that IBM *did* document the SSL packet breakup flag (intended to defeat known text attacks against CBC mode by inserting random padding) — but didn’t flip it on by default like Oracle did. Because they’re IT guys, while the Sun team that’s still in charge of Java (though employed by Oracle) aren’t, they’re computer geeks. In any event, known text attacks against CBC mode isn’t an issue for my application, which is on a secure network where if anybody is snooping on the connection you have bigger problems than this (for the record, the sessions are very short and difficult to hijack for the storage array I’m talking to and the CBC key changes for each session, so the chances of getting enough known plaintext to break the key are pretty slim in the first place), so I’m quite happy flipping the flag to turn *off* the “BEAST attack prevention patch”.
Spring/Hibernate are beastly. I’ve never heard of a Spring/Hibernate project that came in on time or under budget. Me and two other people once mocked up a GUI and associated back end infrastructure in four weeks in PHP, and it worked. It worked well enough that a customer we demoed it to said, “wow, this is a better tool for managing my network of security appliances than the one I paid a gazillion bucks for, when I can I have it?” So management decided hey, “real” applications aren’t written in PHP, and hired a team of Java programmers and a project architect and so forth to write the “real” application using Java, Spring, and Hibernate. Six months later they were still trying to get a working product. Meanwhile our PHP prototype worked, it needed a few rough edges ironed out but nothing that a couple months of work wouldn’t have finished up. But “real” programs aren’t written in PHP. So … gah, the stupid, it burns, it burns! (That company went out of business about six months after burning most of their cash on that failed Java project. Sigh. The story of my life).
And yes, I’m quite aware that WordPress is written in PHP :). My favorite right now is Python and Turbogears. Maybe I’ll get a chance to do something with that…
-BT
BTW, Kryten, Cajuns would *never* deep-fry shrimp. That’s an atrocity against seafood. Real Cajun cooking doesn’t deep-fry *anything*, because neither deep fryers nor sufficient oil to fill them was available when Cajun cooking was being developed. They had local ingredients, that’s all.
Shrimp in Cajun cooking are intended to be boiled in gumbo or stir-fried into a shrimp creole or etoufee or boiled then put into a jambalaya or, if you want just shrimp, boiled in a spicy crab boil with corn and potatoes then served in a giant platter in the middle of the table for everybody to grab shrimp off of (the shrimp should be fresh off the boat when you toss them into the giant cookpot too, though I suppose that’s gone now that the Gulf is dead). Deep frying shrimp is an Anglo thing invented by damnyankees (i.e., everybody from north of I-10 😉 ). No self-respecting Cajun would ever admit to cooking or eating such a thing.
“Real” applications are written in whatever works. There are a lot of languages I’m not fond of using, but if they are the best tool for getting the project out the door, you use them. No one’s asking you to marry them.
PhP is getting better, but Python is the recommended language for messing about with the Pi, so I’ll give it a whirl. It can’t be worse than APL, PL1, or any of the other ancient stuff I have used over the years.
Bryan, pretty much my thought on the subject too. I’m not a big fan of Perl, which I view as 1200 baud line noise on a static-filled line. But I’ve done a couple of projects in Perl too where it was the best tool for the job (mostly things that needed a *ton* of regular expressions to parse the resulting output from running Unix command line tools that control things like storage and virtualization). I just was careful to document well and write the cleanest, clearest Perl that I could, in hopes that I could actually manage to read it six months later when I had to revisit the code. Sometimes I even succeeded on that last :).
If you know PHP but wish it was more object-oriented and had namespaces, Python will be almost a relief. It’s a very clean language and does not suffer from cancer of the semicolon or curly brace syndrome, though there are some who wish it did. The only real issue I have with the language is its implementation — the reference interpreter, cPython, is single-threaded (that is, the interpreter innards are protected by a Global Interpreter Lock rather than there being individual locks on things that need locking, the only time the lock is released is when system calls are made) so really doesn’t multithread well except on I/O intensive programs where you could do async I/O just as easily, while Jython doesn’t have a GIL but also has numerous incompatibilities with the reference implementation caused by the fact that the JVM won’t let it talk to the hardware. On Linux this doesn’t really matter because you can spawn processes in pretty much the same time as you spawn threads, due to COW page tables. On Windows it can be painful.
I personally am quite fond of assembly language, but the limits are so obvious that there is no need to go into them. I like knowing exactly what the machine is doing, and only machine code provides more certainty than assembler.
Every language has its strengths and weaknesses, and if you need those strengths, you would be a fool to ignore the language. I remember one project where I had to learn the language before doing the coding, but it still was out the door before we could have managed to get anything else ready for an alpha version.
When you free lance, you use what you have to so you can get paid. If you don’t like it, you don’t take the job. If you suggest something different, any failure is your fault, but don’t expect a bonus if it works.
Python looks reasonable, but I have to read a couple of books before I start coding.
Python looks reasonable, but I have to read a couple of books before I start coding.
i’ve only just reached the ‘hello world’ stage in python and all i remember of pl/1 is how to spell pl/c, but it looks less intimidating than json.
The trick is figuring out if it will do things you want to do, or that other people may want you to do for money 😉
or that other people may want you to do for money 😀