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I don't seem to have the time to post here regularly, but I hope to make posting here a habit.
In the mean time I thought I would list some of the the stuff I am work on, experimenting with or just playing around with. Hopefully I will find the time to elaborate on this stuff down the road, but her is a short summary in no particular order. SquuezeCenter Chumby Parallel Programming LED sign Button Pad Xbee Amazon EC2 and more... Open the post to get more details
I set up SqueezeCenter (http://www.slimdevices.com ) in a VMware VM running Ubuntu Server 7.10. Since the company became a Logitech property the interface has been slicked up a bit and now includes album art and some other cool features. I actually don't own a Squeezebox, but am considering ordering the Duet. In the mean time I am using SoftSqueeze and it is working well on my PC's. I also intend to stream audio from there to my new Chumby when it gets here next week. I attempted to run SqueezeCenter on my NAS box, but it just wasn't responsive enough for me, so I went with the VM on another PC. It's running great with only 256MB of RAM and almost no CPU utilization, so the footprint is pretty low. No problems with my 10K+ track audio library so far...
Chumby! I have been eyeing the Chumby (http://www.chumby.com ) for a while, and now that it is officially released I decided to grab one. They just got 12+ million in round B funding, so I am hoping some great stuff comes out of that! My intention is to put it in a high traffic area of my home and have it receive an audio stream from my SqueezeCenter, display the "family calendar" from google apps, show messages from a special twitter account I created for the chumby, weather and news information, interesting photos from my new "chumby" photoset on Flickr, and messages I send to an email account I created for it. I am sure I will come up with some other interesting stuff too, but I managed to test all that out, with the exception of the local audio stream, on a "virtual chumby" on the chumby site, and from all indications it seems that it will work great! I will probably post something when I get it set up.
We are creating various implementations of parallel algorithms in my class using MPI, OpenMP and pthreads. Sometimes I think my brain is going to explode! This coming Tuesday a research scientist from Nvidia will be guest lecturing on the CUDA architecture available in the newer chipsets. That should be an interesting time especially since it is based on a SIMD model, which is pretty foreign to me at this point. for more info on SIMD look here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIMD
I am still working on my LED sign. I did a rewire of the harness connecting the display unit to the Parallax Propeller proto board I am using to simplify the assembly code I am writing. My previous wiring had the address lines wired in an unusual way and the scanning code wasbecoming needlessly complex. Now that that is done hopefully I can make some headway. I saw that someone had implemented the "Life" cellular automaton on much smaller LCD display, so I thought that should be my first working application. I want to find a variation that will make use of the tri-color nature of the array to make it even more visually interesting.
I am still playing around with a few other interesting projects. I got an illuminated 16 button pad from SparkFun and hope to interface that to a Propeller board as well. The button pad was inspired by the Monome project, but has connections for RGB LEDs so it's a bit different. The board supplied is basically just a breakout, so I will have to build the supporting circuits myself. I will probably use a similar design as the LED sign and use shift registers and a scanning algorithm to illuminate the buttons. Doing PWB and scanning should be interesting... I hope to have the button pad communicating with other devices via XBee modules, although I also have some ideas about making a gaming pad out of it too for Team Fortress 2 or whatever. Each button could be a weapon slot, and the color might indicate your current ammo status... Have to figure out some sort of USB interface for that.
I am also still working on my Amazon EC2 scalable cluster project. I don't want to go into too much detail on that one, but its' been pretty interesting.
I am trying to use the Web to do as much as I can these days. Google Apps, Docs, calendar Sites, Yahoo Pipes, a hosted Subversion server for my code, twitter, etc, etc. So far I am pretty satisfied with the results and the resulting virtualization of my productivity environment. I have some issues, but it seems to be going pretty well. I actually shut off my full time server a week or so ago andhaven't really missed it since most of my files are on the NAS appliance anyway. I was using the server for backups and email but I backup to Amazon S3 for cheap off-site storage, and use google apps for my email. The other stuff is transitioning to virtual machines on my "always on anyway" workstation. Ideally I would get set up so that I would require that either, but haven't got a solution for the home automation and media server stuff yet.
This is a bunch of other stuff too, but hose are the things I am thinking about right now, besides it's late and need to get some sleep.
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