Controlling Katamari using a real life ball interfaced with an Arduino

Another wonderful concept using Arduino. This one uses a steel ball as the interface and a regular laser mouse as the pickup device, that info goes into an arduino which encodes it through a digital potentiometer and sends it on to a controller.



Reference: arduino.cc , kellbot.com, nycresistor.com

MAGIC !!! Coolest Arduino Hack EVAR!!!

Okay, so this is the kind of stuff I want to do with my recently acquired arduino kit!




I think instead of using the knocks, a grid of magnetic sensors would be much more appropriate. What you do is carry a small magnet around on your keychain (if you don't already) and wave it at the door in a given pattern right,down,left,right and the door magically opens

Now that could take care of giving temporary access to premises to whomever you wish.

Virtual Box 3.1.0 is out (now with Teleportation!)

So, the latest virtualbox is out and it supports live session migration from one host to another. Yay!!!

Other new features in this major upgrade (from the announcement):

• Teleportation (aka live migration); migrate a live VM session from one host to another (see the manual for more information)
• VM states can now be restored from arbitrary snapshots instead of only the last one, and new snapshots can be taken from other snapshots as well ("branched snapshots"; see the manual for more information)
• 2D video acceleration for Windows guests; use the host video hardware for overlay stretching and color conversion (see the manual for more information)
• More flexible storage attachments: CD/DVD drives can be attached to an arbitrary IDE controller, and there can be more than one such drive (the manual for more information)
• The network attachment type can be changed while a VM is running
• Complete rewrite of experimental USB support for OpenSolaris hosts making use of the latest USB enhancements in Solaris Nevada 124 and higher
• Significant performance improvements for PAE and AMD64 guests (VT-x and AMD-V only; normal (non-nested) paging)
• Experimental support for EFI (Extensible Firmware Interface; see the manual for more information)
• Support for paravirtualized network adapters (virtio-net; see the manual for more information)

Get your latest virtualbox download here.

Arduino!!!!

I've had a bit of a downtime in the last couple weeks, so I've been playing around with Arduino to explore the wonderful world of physical computing. I used to do breadboarding in highschool, but haven't done much since then. Recently, I listened to the Arduino founder on one of the FLOSS Weekly podcasts and was hoping to find some free time to play around with programming the ATMega microcontroller.

After having played with it a bit and making some blinkenlights and music to go along with it, I think I'm ready to move on to some real interfacing with server instrumentation and monitoring data ...

Getting server alerts on circuits you designed yourself, now that would be cool!


ref: (Photo by Nicholas Zambetti) via arduino.cc

Oracle VM Templates released!!!

Exciting news! Oracle has released its PT8.50 and HC9.1 environment in the form of three VM's (one each for web/app/db tier)!!! This is really exciting stuff! I think this would make environment management really easy for Peoplesoft clients and I can see Oracle pushing out "certified" environments in the future for other applications and modules as well.

I'm not sure why Oracle is not moving into the AMI space. It wouldn't be a whole lot of work to convert these images to AMI's and run on a Virtual Private Cloud, but it would be cool if Oracle released these images with their blessing.

In a way this would put a monkey wrench in the plans of those small fry VAR's who were planning on picking up some crumbs off the Oracle table (hint hint!) but in the long run I think this is a great strategy!

Oracle and Amazon AWS behind the protection of a VPC would be an awesome combination and would really enable agile project environments! Imaging provisioning your test environments on a half-day notice after cutting gold images, and getting two teams to test two test-moves as soon as both are complete!

I haven't installed and played with these yet, but this is a development that will probably push me over the edge and I think I'll end up by a 4-8 core box just to recreate a Virtual lab for testing out the exciting new configurations possible!

References:

• Via: Nicolas Gasparotto's Blog, "On the Peoplesoft Road"
  
• Origianl Announcement: "Oracle VM Template for Peoplesoft"
  
• Oracle White Paper on the VM Templages(Pdf)
  

Haskell and Java ... two great tastes that go great together

Or something to that effect. Lately, I've been on a bit of a Java and Haskell binge. I hadn't done Java for a long time after doing some elementary work in it a while back. It was a treat to find this set of lectures taught by a really energetic and competent teacher (ex googler?), so I've been playing around and having fun with "Karel the Robot" following the awesome stanford lectures by Mehran Sahami for CS106A. And here is the link to the Youtube Programming Methodology Lectures (All of em!).

Meanwhile, in true ADHD fashion, I have also been fascinated by the coolness that is Haskell. And this was triggered by the most recent C9 lectures by Dr. Eric Meijer on Haskell.

Here are the links to the first two lectures.

C9 Lectures - Dr. Erik Meijer - Functional Programming Fundamentals, Chapter 1 of 13



C9 Lectures: Dr. Erik Meijer - Functional Programming Fundamentals, Chapter 2 of 13



And after that whets you appetite a bit, head on over to blip.tv for the Haskell talk given by Simon Peyton Jones (of Microsoft) for OSCON 2007. (it is broken into two videos)

Part the First (78 minutes):


Part the Deux (111 minutes):



References:

1. A Gentle Introduction to Haskell
2. Haskell WinHugs (Hugs98) "interpreter"/REPL to play around with on your Windows machine.
3. Haskell Platform Suite (GHC compiler, libraries.. the whole shbang! all in one easy package... just in case you fall in love ;^) ...

4. Stanford Eclipse (comes with the ACM libraries and a much leaner interface for playing around with the class assignments - if you're just starting out with Java and don't want to lose sight of the forest for the trees)
5. CS106A - Programming Methodology Lectures on Youtube (all 28 of them!)

Larry Ellison Unscripted (cross post from PeepCloud)

Larry Ellison on the origins of Oracle, Acquisition of Sun, Linux vs. Solaris and Cloud Computing ...

And here is the clip where he went postal after the host asked him about "Cloud Computing".... I hadn't laughed this hard in days! :) (HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!)

Source: Fora.Tv

Peoplesoft HCM 9.1 and PeopleTools 8.50 is OUT!

Well, it's been out since Sep 18th, I just never got around to posting the exciting news! As the Peoplesoft Dev blog points out, the GA Release is now available. I checked edelivery and yeth!!! it is out baby!!! :)

This new version has a lot of goodies! Some of the new stuff from the blog entry:

2. Improved Developer Productivity

• a. Enhanced Interactive PeopleCode Debugger
• b. AppClass Drilldown PeopleCode Editor
• c. Improved Integration Test Tools
• 3. Expanded Reporting and Query options
• a. Query as Feeds enabling users to retrieve PeopleSoft data via RSS

4. Infrastructure, LCM and Security enhancements

• a. Adoption of Java 6 on all server tiers
• b. Latest versions of WebLogic Server, WebSphere and Tuxedo
• c. Full support for 64-bit Linux and Windows
• d. Secure PS_Home
• e. Integration to Oracle Configuration Manager
• f. Support for Oracle TDE, Database Vault and Audit Vault
• g. FTPS and ADAM (AD LDS) support