This little raptor was perched on top of a big mound of crushed rock in the area below the parking lot. She stayed put while a bike rider went past, but eventually decided to head off and I caught her launching into the air.
This shot was one of my first taken with a circular polarizing filter. Looks very surreal in some ways.
…came in the mail yesterday. I’ve loaded up the OS (one of several available Linux derivatives) and booted it up free standing.
Next I need to find the driver code I need to get the USB WiFi module I bought for it working with the RedHat derived OS that I loaded.
The module is from a company called ‘EdiMax’. The source from the provided CD failed to build last night (just a quick make to see what would happen) and a few web searches suggested that the chip vendor site had better drivers available. I’m going to take a look at lunch time and see if I can locate that reference again and download those driver sources.
The board looks like
and the adapter is tiny thumb drive sized
I just read a few more comments and it looks as if the quick road to getting this up may involved wired ethernet (which I cannot connect to here) and so tonight may be the earliest I can try this out.
I’m hoping in the long run to get moving on the RepRap build and perhaps use this board as the control computer for the thing. The Arduino handles all of the ‘fast twitch’ work and the R-Pi for WiFi and high level control. That could give a mostly free standing device which could be pretty cool.
Long first day. Aside from the HR stuff, found out that they use Macs for most desktop stuff. They hit the one OS that I have not had a reason to become even the least bit familiar with. Now trying to familiarize myself with the environment and basic system behaviors so I can get to the really hard stuff. Interesting times, gonna be some hard work in the near future, but should be interesting.
and looking at things I can do this coming week that will help with my Linux and Java refresher activity. I’m certainly hoping that there are no more surprises lurking before I can get started though.
I’m going to try to do some Java coding on the CentOs box that I’ve got running now. I also want to get it running some sort of RDP type protocol (VNC maybe) to allow remote access within the house (and perhaps from outside if I decide to open a firewall forward rule).
Still deciding what would be worth doing, still reading and getting things configured a bit better at the moment.
The state of New Hampshire has been slow in returning my background check information to Amazon and it looks like the ETA is next Tuesday so I’m likely to be waiting another week before getting started at Kiva.
I’m going to try to find out what version of Linux and Java they’re running so I can focus my pre-start investigations. If things don’t come through at the last moment, I’m going to try to spend next week doing some aggressive mucking around with Java on the Linux install I’ve gotten up and running here (CentOS).
Today I’m tidying up the office and getting things ready for some serious coding…