Journey vs. Destination

The build instructions for my are-you-ok widget is up on SparkFun! How neat!

This isn’t the end for that project. I’ve been working on getting email on Maxwell (surprisingly not difficult). I’m going to visit Hugh this weekend to see why his accelerometer is fussy.

In a couple weeks, Elizabeth will be on the podcast again to talk about what needs to happen next, if she’s happy with the system and what changes to make. There is a rumor that SparkFun will have a kit of parts for me to give away at that time to podcast listeners. (I need a contest! Guess a number? The quotes are too easy thanks to google.)

For someone who seems to be always starting a contract next week (sigh), I have been busy. My EELive talk is going up on element14. I’m staying about a week ahead though this week I have to do the summary and I’m not ready.  Also, on element14, Sophi Kravitz asked me questions about consulting but I kept distracting her with RTOSs and stories of are-you-ok widgets. I’m happy with her resulting interview.

I went to the SOLID conference. it was interesting and eclectic. O’Reilly gave a big stack of my books away while I signed them and stress-chatted with people. I was there as press, recording things for the podcast. But Christopher says the noise level is too high, the results are too difficult to listen to. Argh. I’m not sure what I’m going to do. I do need to do something to “pay” for the press pass (and all the people I talked to).

I am still working with the Beagle Bone Black, though slowly. I updated my MacBook Pro from Win7 32-bit to Win7 64-bit which lets me use more than 2G of RAM. That is a complete re-install so I’m still finding things I forgot to back up (my bookmarks!). One reason to do this was to run virtual machines so now I have Linux running too. (It is the Oracle 6 one which seems to be Fedora based, I’m still orienting on how things work.) I’m trying to build Angstrom, just to update the OS that is on the board (step 1: update with known good image, step 2: update with my built image that should be the same as the known good, step 3: break everything).

I’m currently installing Python 2.7 because some precursor to actually building Angstrom needs it. It just gave me an error in the build process of python because it doesn’t have some library it needs. This is exactly how I remember Linux being.

I hope you have a good, relaxing weekend. I plan to.