Posts Tagged ‘ Raspberry Pi ’

Hollow Satisfaction

For the last couple days I have been messing around with the idea of making websites. It is an area that I have had much curiosity for because I never really understood how the whole internet concept worked.

That has changed as of today. I now feel capable of doing most things in regards to website creation (Not like an expert but I  have confidence that I would know where to look to solve any problem).

Here is what I did:

  • First I took my Raspberry Pi and loaded a web-server onto it.
  • I registered a free domain name.
  • I configured the router to forward requests to the server.
  • Finally I installed word-press (After relearning basic MySQL), and added a custom theme with plugins for a checkout so you could buy my theoretical T-Shirts.

It took ages, but I managed. And then I thought long and hard about what I had achieved. I realised that the end result was nothing. Sure a crappy website existed and I completely made it from scratch. But it meant nothing.

Learning it was awesome, but having finished was insignificant. Re-enforcing the whole journey being more important than the finish idea.

2012
12/03
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Applied computer science

I finished up my Ruby on Rails tutorial last night and I felt that it was a little anti-climatic. There was no rush of achievement or anything. But there was a little excitement in what it meant, it meant that I could start working on my Raspberry Pi.

The Raspberry Pi is a fully working computer, probably with the power of a pentium 2 but with a little added for graphics. But because the only place to store anything is on the SD card it means that the really low level tools (The boot-loader and the kernel) are exposed and easily modified.

This allows for us to mess around with some parts of the computer that are normally pretty difficult; this sort of programming is named Bare Metal (because you are working almost directly with the hardware).

So I spent today learning all the basics and getting the tool-kits working. Then after many hours I managed to do something really simple: I got a little green LED on the board to light up. That is all I did.

But the significant thing about this insignificant LED was that it is the first external thing to ever come out of my efforts in computing.

Normally when I am playing around with this stuff, all that ever comes about are a few pixels changing on the screen. This LED is tangible, it required a signal down a specific line to power up the LED. It isn’t much more effort to make the signal work all kinds of electronic circuits.

And there was a significant feeling of achievement, all because a silly little light turned on.

2012
10/17
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Raspberry Pi

Today I received my new Raspberry Pi, the credit card sized PC, and I am feeling really giddy. The reason I bought it is to teach myself about lower level computing concepts, like how does the operating system work and how does the computer communicate with all its different resources (Because this computer is so small and theoretically more simple than a full sized PC).

You receive this thing and it comes with no instructions what so ever. There is just it, in its box, and you get told nothing. Granted there are dozens of manuals on the internet but I like the idea, “This thing has many uses, you don’t need to be baby fed information, figure it out yourself”. Too many things these days come with more warnings and instructions than necessary (Mostly to reduce a companies liability) but it makes you feel like the designers don’t think you are capable of using basic items correctly.

But I am really excited, I haven’t been this excited over a “thing” in ages. But I must pace myself, I still am half way through my Ruby on Rails tutorial and I need to finish that before I let myself play with this new toy.

2012
10/11
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