To facilitate the sharing of contents, I’ve decided to move my personal work blog to Tumblr. Thus, The Rice Cooker has now become The Electric Rice Cooker.
I got myself a Pandaboard a few weeks ago. It’s a community-supported fan-less board sponsored by Texas Instruments. It sports their OMAP 4430 chip, which is the same CPU as found in the Kindle Fire, Motorola Droid RAZR and a bunch of other smartphones (the Galaxy Nexus has its successor, the 4460).
So, when I first got it, I installed Ubuntu Linux (Linaro) on it. Used it very little, and sort of figured out the basics, such as installing an Apache webserver, but finally noticing that it lacked support for things I wanted to try out, such as Google Video Chat (which is not yet available for an ARM architecture, the one commonly found in most smartphones today).
So, I instead followed instructions on a YouTube video from the Pandaboard website that said you could install Android 4.0. And turns out you could, by following the instructions (you can find clearer instructions on the Web). So, now I have Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich on the board… Next step is to figure out how to get (or just wait for) the Google Apps (Gmail, Gtalk, etc.), and support for basic hardware such as video and audio capture.
In terms of media and journalism, there is perhaps some potential to create new ways to interact with information, by plugging a projector and some sensors to detect human input. In computing power, the Pandaboard is probably as powerful as a top of the line smartphone, yet at a much lower price of US$178 (but then, so flashy touchscreen). The form factor is interesting for embedded systems, which is something I only discovered this year.
Naturally, to share code, there is no equal to GitHub, a Web-based hosting service for code using the popular Git revision control. In plain language, it means that the code that I am writing, mostly for the JMSC nowadays, will be available on GitHub.
To start things, I put some of the Python scripts that I wrote for our online social media research project: http://github.com/JMSCHKU/Social/
For those who are unfamiliar with GitHub, it has been ubiquitous whenever I needed source code (mostly for compiling into usable programs). I assume that many people already know of SourceForge, the open-source code repository started at the turn of the century. GitHub innovates compared with SF.net by decentralizing version control.
For starters,