I finally got hold of my first Raspberry Pi.
This morning I’ve burned a Debian “squeeze” distro to the SD card, and performed an initial boot just to check that it’s working. The next step is to set up a proper development environment for experimentation. I have some ideas for projects, but most of them require some extra hardware that I don’t have to hand right now.
Linux VMs installed on Mac OS X do not pick up the correct key mappings for some of the keys. You need to use the following xmodmap commands to correct them:
xmodmap -e "keycode 94=grave asciitilde grave asciitilde dead_grave dead_horn"
xmodmap -e "keycode 49=section plusminus section plusminus section plusminus"
I haven’t had much time lately for updating the blog. So if you’re interested, please find some that I’ve written for my employer, IPL.
Subjects covered range from the use of neutrinos in financial trading, to social network analysis and smartphones.
I’ll be attending the Summer Garden Party at Bletchley Park on 2011-08-04, raising funds for the restoration of Block C to create a new visitors’ centre.
The event is being supported by Google. More information is available at Dr Black’s site.
Once you have launched your Amazon EC2 Linux instance, save your .pem keyfile somewhere secure. Protect it so that only you can read it (otherwise ssh will refuse to work):
chmod 400 <keyfile>
Connect to your instance using this command:
ssh -i <keyfile> <username>@<servername>.compute.amazonaws.com
To transfer files to this instance, first modify (or create) ~/.ssh/config, adding this line:
IdentityFile <keyfile>
Then connect using sftp:
sftp <username>@<servername>.compute.amazonaws.com
Now you can use sftp commands to transfer files to and from your EC2 instance.
My IPL blog post:
How do you get a novel technology to fly in space?
I attended and presented a paper at the 2010 International Symposium on Solar Sailing. At the same conference Les Johnson, from NASA’s Advanced Concepts Office, gave a very interesting presentation on this problem of implementing novel technologies.
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My IPL blog post:
How does the ability to download an image of a Saturn sunrise help us deal with natural disasters?
Up to now, deep space missions have relied upon the provision of dedicated links back to Earth. The probe points a radio dish toward Earth, and a network of large antennas is aimed at the probe to pick up the meagre traces of signal that remain after the transmission has made its way over millions of kilometres.
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