My second eBook, Build Your Own Distributed Compilation Cluster – A Practical Walkthrough is now available for purchase online. This 60+ page tutorial walks one through the creation of a fully distributed compilation system. With practical advice and heaps of source and script examples, you can pick up this helpful eBook at Amazon and Barnes and Nobles sites and be using your own custom distributed compilation system within hours. I’ll be updating the permalink page (top-right on my WordPress theme) with shopping links once the shopping pages go live. While I remain hard at work at Discursive Labs and on a number of other projects, my next eBook project will most likely be a large collection of my hacks and this eBook should keep your e-reader in use till then.
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My second eBook, Build Your Own Distributed Compilation Cluster – A Practical Walkthrough is a collected volume of my article series of the same name. Throughout the 6 in-depth how-to articles, I’ll take you through the process of building a fully working cross-compilation distributed build system. The canonical example is of building a distributed ARM to X86-64 cross-compilation cluster. This system is also generic enough to apply to most any compilation environment, while remaining powerful enough to outperform all but the most advanced compilation systems. With source code examples provided and easy step by step instructions, this 60+ page instructional eBook is a valuable introductory and practical resource for those interested in distributed compilation, cross compilation, low power computing clusters, and so much more. It’s also one terrific bargain, and an excellent reference.
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As some of you have pointed out to me, the links to the free review copy of my eBook “Life For Free – The Chronicles of a Nerd Saving For A Startup” have gone down. Due to an increase in demand I’m putting Live For Free back into print and it’ll be available online at Amazon and Barnes and Nobles stores initially, with more stores to follow if things go well. If any of you have purchased it, please do leave an honest review and rating. It’s invaluable for me to know how my books are being accepted as well as for others to know what they are getting into. I’ll update the LFF permalink (top-right corner in my WordPress theme) to contain purchase links to various bookstores as it comes up. I’ve decided to price it at 99c, hoping that it’ll be an easy impulse purchase from your Kindle or Nook.
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Here’s a fun thing I came up with for those Steam users out there. Ever wanted to use an SSH client in the middle of a Steam game? I’ve got an arm based server running constantly at my house (4 watts average power usage) doing menial chores like downloading and file serving and queuing up print jobs, playing music, etc. I prefer to SSH into a screen or byobu session, start a long task, then disconnect and check back later. If you’re relaxing at home playing a game in Steam however, you may not want to alt-tab out of your game session. Besides, if you’re running in Wine there’s a fairly good chance this will crash your game in some fashion. Short of booting up another computer or opening ports on your router to allow web-based ssh services to work, what is one to do? Read on for my solution to the problem.
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Quite the dramatic lead-in, I know. It’s been one week since I finally bit the bullet and ordered a Pixel Qi trans-reflective screen from Makershed and just over one whole work day since I installed it. And what a difference a day makes. Here I sit, typing a blog post and fixing bugs, not 20 feet from the ocean. At 11am. In Los Angeles. The sun is shining brightly overhead, and I’m actually getting work done on my laptop. It’s fantastic. For those of you who haven’t heard of the Pixel Qi screen, it’s from the folks at Pixel Qi, a spinoff from the OLPC project. You can order the screen right now for 250$ on sale from Makershed and I have to say it is quite worth it, at least if you’d like to get some work done in the sun. If you’re smart about it, you can actually get yourself set up with a Pixel Qi enabled netbook relatively cheaply, as I did.
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Following up on my previous post, NeonLicht suggested I try out the Ion window manager. Being a big fan of alternative window managers etc, I decided to give it a whirl. Turns out that the most current version of Ion, Ion3 has been branched and reborn as the Notion window manager. After some general use I’ve come to the conclusion that while it’s not for everyone, it’s a terrifically interesting and forward-facing implementation of a window manager. Also, providing you’re willing to compile the source from git (instructions after the jump), the setup for an ideal programmer’s desktop becomes rather simplified from my last post. Read on for all the detailed info. Compilation and Installation First you’ll want to checkout the project from git. Create a nice working directory, then execute a git clone git://notion.git.sourceforge.net/gitroot/notion/notion<br></br> in said directory. This will check out the Notion source code. This comes with a nice writeup on how to install. For other Ubuntu/Debian users, it basically boils down to a quick 4-step install.
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While not famous in any sense of the word, I’m pretty used to having folks come up to me in public and ask me questions. These are usually along the lines of “I’ve never seen a laptop like that before..did you build it?” (yes I did) or “how did you get it to do that?” (Linux, mostly). Lately, I’ve had a few people comment on my somewhat unique desktop “wallpaper” I use on my laptop, and I thought I’d do a quick tutorial for those coming in off google searches :). This is basically a 5-up devilspie embedded application background consisting of terminals, text editors, and conky. I keep these on my primary desktop in Ubuntu at all times, and this is the configuration I’ve found to be optimal. Read on for the detailed setup guide and rationale behind this configuration
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A very cool and strange thing (for me at least) has happened. Having spent a great deal of time digging through my Google analytic reports, I can say with certainty that my personal site traffic is on the rise. What’s most interesting to me is that a good portion of that new readership linked into my site from my corporate blog. Even more interesting, our corporate blog over at www.discursivelabs.com has far eclipsed the readership of my personal blog here at www.hunterdavis.com. As such, I thought I’d share the link to my newest article.
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As the title implies in our latest article over at Discursive Labs we walk you through the creation of a fully distributed compilation system (i.e. a fully federated system not based on DistCC, Sun’s DMAKE, or other existing distributed compilation tools). The scripts are available in the article and can be dropped into an existing compilation node or as a base for future development. While I have posted a few articles over at Discursive Labs since I last posted here, I thought this one in particular may be of interest to anyone wishing to make their own cluster for compilation or scientific computing. If you’re interested in cross-compiling, low power ARM clusters, virtual clusters or distributed computing and you’re not reading our continuing series then you should really catch up.
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Are you looking for something new and interesting to run on your Pogoplug after reading that last article on emulators? Ever considered using it to compile software that runs natively on your X86-64 machine? Did you even know this was a possibility?
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