I ran into this exact quandry when my home thermostat died late last year. Didn't want Nest/Google nor anyone else getting my data. Furthermore, I'm rural so broadband is expensive and sometimes flakey, so that was another reason to want a local-net-only solution, but there were no good ones I could find.
So I just built my own smart thermostat based on a Raspberry Pi: https://github.com/chaeron/thermostat
Since then, I've added battery-powered remote sensors (temp, humidity, pressure, water detection, etc.) to monitor key areas in and outside of the house. These were based on Arduinos (to keep power usage low) and the open source MySensors framework (https://www.mysensors.org/)
Fun project, works great, no security issues or cloud crap.;-)
More recently I've built on that experience and am working on a dirt bike telemetry project which is based on an Arduino Mega with a GPS module, 9-axis motion sensor, hall effect sensors (for wheel spin/RPM detection) and more. The device captures real time info about the location and movement of the bike (eg. pitch, lean angle, etc.) and then can be used to overlay gauges and a moving 3D bike model over top of headcam footage captured during a ride.
In the winter time (and where I am, it's damned cold out during the winter...snow banks are over my head right now), I have to shut off the heat vent in my office.
The heat thrown my all the machines in here, one main dev box, 1 laptop and 3 small appliance servers, plus all the peripherals keep the office nicely heated all winter.
The key question is why do you want to learn to program on Linux?
If it's to further career goals, then it would be best to look forwards and not back. And almost all of the suggestions are looking back at the past.
The future? XRX - XQuery/REST/XForms (and XSLT).
Master that and you'll be able to deliver apps faster than the most rabid Rubyites and will be much in demand if a career is what you are after.
Fact is, if you don't know XRX, then you won't be working for my firm.;-)
Commonly used languages never seem to die. COBOL is a good example, and a lucrative one, though probably not a lot of fun these days. C is partly there as well, though is good for foundation knowledge or if you have a hankering to work on Linux internals. But it's all past history. Look to new technologies, functional languages, concurrent languages (Erlang comes to mind) and stuff that makes XML easy and productive to use.
It'll be more fun, and more lucrative too, I'll bet.
Was it an Astronomically Significant Star Hole? Or maybe it was the infamous Big Universe Nonexistent Galaxy Hole? Then again, there are some scientists that prefer the Asymptotic Reality Subsystem Event Hole theory.
Makes you think. What if god is a pointy haired manager?
If you have 30-year-old shoplifting/minor drug possession convictions AND try to come into Canada carrying a bottle of shampoo that is larger then 4 ounces (Imperial that is! Wonder what it would be in millilitres? ), you'll be sent to a work camp up in the high arctic where you'll be forced to hand-craft Inukshuks for purchase by tourists that are not hardened criminals and thus will be allowed into Canada.
I'm not sure I agree with your causal connections. Most good/natural "leaders" never become project managers in the first place. It's not an attractive career option. I've never seen a project manager rise to upper management ranks, probably for just that reason.
A project manager tends to be a twilight zone position. Really knowledgeable business or technical people are not interested, and have other career paths. So PM's rarely have good knowledge of the domain that they are supposedly managing. In fact, I would suggest that in the IT world, many PM's are failed techies, that couldn't cut it doing "real work", or good techies that hit a ceiling in the career path, switched to PM for the opportunity, but have no/little leadership talent, are now obsolete technically (ie no longer knowledgeable), and having instantiated their own version of Peter Principle hell, are very unhappy. Extremely talented techies rarely want to become PM's and if they do, usually bail out pretty quickly, since they don't find it very satisfying.
Good managers don't become PM's because that would be a step down the food chain.
So a PM is typically not good or knowledgeable about the domain, nor do they have good management skills (typically a poor attempt at a synonym for leadership). I'm sure there are exceptions to this rule...but I have yet to meet one.
Though there is a germ of truth in your comment, though not quite as you laid it out. Good leaders (at any level or in any discipline) are extremely valuable and also quite rare, so why in the world would they or their companies want them to be PM's. Doesn't typically happen. QED.
But the exec managers want to delegate and treat people like robot automatons. They are deluded in thinking that is productive or a good path to success, but regardless, they then delegate to the "professional" PM's who then continue to foster the delusion to the next level. Self-fulfilling prophecies.
I don't much believe that there is any such thing as "management of people". You can motivate, inspire, lead, cajole, sell and even threaten (though that is counterproductive as a consistent approach). But you can't "manage" a human being. They have free will, and most will exercise it...many times covertly to your detriment if they smell you are trying to "manage" them. Managing is a dirty word....it conjures images of manipulation, coercion and worse, by it's very nature.
People are messy as thus is leadership. It's an art....not a skill you can acquire from a book (PMBOK) or in a course. You can only learn it in the SOHK (school of hard knocks) and by mentoring/example.
Funny thing...I used to think that to assemble (and inspire) a hotshot team, you needed top-notch, hot-shot resources. Experience has caused me to rethink that. An exceptional leader (notice, I didn't say manager, nor project manager), can take a solid, but average group of individuals, and and inspire them to productivity and greatness that would boggle your mind. Maybe that's because most organizations are a mediocre grey (the law of averages virtually guarantees that in larger organizations) and it doesn't take that much to stand out. But you only need that little productivity/inspiration/perspiration uplift to work miracles, and blow away your competition in the process.
Which brings me to my last point. Unless you are a mature student with a long history of business experience behind you, I doubt that you have much in the way of leadership skills. It's not something they teach you in school or something that can be learned in a Bachelor's curriculum (which explains why so many MBA's are so useless and cause so much damage through their hubris). Real world experience counts. Not much else does when it comes to leadership, though I do admit there are some rare folks that have a natural talent for leading and inspiring.
That being said, the abysmal level of PM's in general, means that you are probably correct in saying "I could do it better than most". B
I have yet to meet one that I consider competent. Though I have heard fairy tales of such mythical beasties actually existing.
The push towards ever more (incompetent) PM's stems from a lack of leadership in the executive suite and the common misconception (or desire) that people are fungible resources, that can be plugged and played at will. Exec Management in many companies (especially the large ones) have no concept of leadership, and thus they promote a mechanistic approach to management, which manifests in their hiring ever more PMs and delegating responsibility down to them.
Ever seen a project manager that could be labelled a "project leader"? I haven't. Yet. And I'm not holding my breath.
PM's, at least the accredited ones, worship the PMBOK (Which would be better acronymized as the PMFOC, IMO). Seen any mention of a PMBOL (Book of Leadership)? That'll be the day.
Unfortunately, I see no end to this approach. It's only going to get worse, till everything crumbles. Offshoring is just another symptom of higher management's abdication of leadership and the treatment of people as commodity components.
> digital workflow is a savior for many professionals
And enthusiastic, serious amateurs and semi-pros like myself.
I've always loved making images, for decades (yeah, I'm an olde phart). But I wasn't doing much photography only a few years ago, for the sake of making art. It was just too much of a pain, taking stuff to the lab, waiting, and more so than anything, not having end to end creative control.
I used a small Nikon Coolpix digital in conjunction with my film SLR for a few years, and loved it. The film stuff was rarely pulled out. Then I took the plunge about 2.5 years ago and went full digital with a Nikon D100 DSLR, all new glass, Epson 2200 printer and Photoshop-based workflow.
That step was the best thing I could have done for my photography. It rekindled my enthusiasm. Since then I've taken 12K frames...which is more than I probably shot in all the decades before that. As a result of this practice, my skills have improved dramatically.
I donated my film gear to a friend's neice who wanted to get into photography, but would never be able to afford a DSLR due to her age (quite young).
So yeah, digital was definitely a saviour in my case.
Ever seen how fast lab-processed snaps fade and colour shift in albums?
I'll take a good pigment-based, inkjet print on archival paper any day. Sure it's a bit more trouble....but then I can do it in the comfort of my own home office, without having to drive to a lab and without any delay. should I so choose.
As for keeping their "valuable once-in-a-lifetime" snaps intact for more than a few years, given the abysmal lack of photographic sensibility that most "morons" (to use our term) have, maybe this is a feature and not a bug?
On the plus side, the digital explosion has prompted the unwashed masses to take many more photos, and in many case, one can hope that more practice will lead to better photos, at least for some.
I find it amusing, on a high-tech forum like/., how many photographic luddites have surfaced to extol the virtues of film and decry the advancement of digital photography. But that amusement on my part is incidental and solely based on personal beliefs and prejudice, very much like most of the opinions expressed here, which try to masquerade as facts.
The tool is irrelevant. The result is what matters. I judge someone's photography by the appeal of their prints, their artistic sensibilities, their composition skills, the emotional impact the image has on me and the like. Doesn't much matter whether the photographer used a home made pinhole camera, 35mm film, med/lg format, DSLR or high-resolution scanning back.
Once it's printed, most people can't tell what technology was used.
The most critical piece of equipment is the "i" behind the camera. Most people can't take a decent photo (from an artistic perspective, personal snaps excluded) even if given a F5 or 1DS MkII (or better).
That being said, I'll put some of my photography up against anyones. And until recently, I was exclusively DSLR at 6mp. Now I'm up to 10 and even happier.
Bottom line, pixel peeping (or film grain peeping if you must) is boring. Get thee hence and create beautiful images cause everything else is just technological masturbation.
Some of my stuff can be found at: Tarafrost Photography, for those that might be interested.
I disagree with your conclusion as to why this is so. Very few labs process raw for any manufacturer, so the bulk of photographers that shoot raw, post-process it till it's "just right", save it as a Photoshop PSD if need be, then convert to jpeg before they send to the lab, since by then there would be no extra value to be had in sending the raw format.
As a semi-pro photographer, I want and love the control that digital gives me. No more depending on the lab tech's "opinion" on what the white balance should be, or how the print should look. Most pros are using an end-to-end colour managed workflow which obsoletes the need for having the lab do this.
But he's in Mass. But there are copies of the code outside of the US already, so Pandora is free and won't go back in her box no matter what.
I wonder if we should start referring to "coffin" in Nikon's nail now?
Nikon needs to get a clue and give us, their customers (I have a lot of $'s tied up in Nikon DSLR gear, and Photoshop/etc. too) what we want. Documented RAW formats and/or support of an open raw standard like DNG.
Slashdot Mirror
I ran into this exact quandry when my home thermostat died late last year. Didn't want Nest/Google nor anyone else getting my data. Furthermore, I'm rural so broadband is expensive and sometimes flakey, so that was another reason to want a local-net-only solution, but there were no good ones I could find.
So I just built my own smart thermostat based on a Raspberry Pi: https://github.com/chaeron/thermostat
Since then, I've added battery-powered remote sensors (temp, humidity, pressure, water detection, etc.) to monitor key areas in and outside of the house. These were based on Arduinos (to keep power usage low) and the open source MySensors framework (https://www.mysensors.org/)
Fun project, works great, no security issues or cloud crap. ;-)
More recently I've built on that experience and am working on a dirt bike telemetry project which is based on an Arduino Mega with a GPS module, 9-axis motion sensor, hall effect sensors (for wheel spin/RPM detection) and more. The device captures real time info about the location and movement of the bike (eg. pitch, lean angle, etc.) and then can be used to overlay gauges and a moving 3D bike model over top of headcam footage captured during a ride.
No wifi...no support outside the USA....onerous DRM.
What a waste of time from Amazon. They could have pwned the ebook market just by fixing the above three things.
Very disappointing for a company of Amazon's stature.
Oh well....nothing to read here. (all puns intended)
In the winter time (and where I am, it's damned cold out during the winter...snow banks are over my head right now), I have to shut off the heat vent in my office.
The heat thrown my all the machines in here, one main dev box, 1 laptop and 3 small appliance servers, plus all the peripherals keep the office nicely heated all winter.
So...what waste heat...I use mine, thanks!
You can't. Manage that is.
Managing techies is an oxymoron.
You can lead them, if you're good, you have leadership skills and are lucky.
Try to "manage" them and you'll be well on your way to being yet another PHM.
Read some good books on leadership, and pray you learn something about it before your team writes you off.
The key question is why do you want to learn to program on Linux?
If it's to further career goals, then it would be best to look forwards and not back. And almost all of the suggestions are looking back at the past.
The future? XRX - XQuery/REST/XForms (and XSLT).
Master that and you'll be able to deliver apps faster than the most rabid Rubyites and will be much in demand if a career is what you are after.
Fact is, if you don't know XRX, then you won't be working for my firm. ;-)
Commonly used languages never seem to die. COBOL is a good example, and a lucrative one, though probably not a lot of fun these days. C is partly there as well, though is good for foundation knowledge or if you have a hankering to work on Linux internals. But it's all past history. Look to new technologies, functional languages, concurrent languages (Erlang comes to mind) and stuff that makes XML easy and productive to use.
It'll be more fun, and more lucrative too, I'll bet.
My 2 cents worth.
Wanna bet the author is from Nigeria?
Brilliant suggestion. I vote for this approach.
We don't need no steenkin' special tags from Microsoft.
And can we rename the new browser IH8IE?
Was it an Astronomically Significant Star Hole? Or maybe it was the infamous Big Universe Nonexistent Galaxy Hole? Then again, there are some scientists that prefer the Asymptotic Reality Subsystem Event Hole theory.
Makes you think. What if god is a pointy haired manager?
...that the product is being renamed to "SUCSTICK"?
As for the French Intelligence Service, isn't that an oxymoron?
If you have 30-year-old shoplifting/minor drug possession convictions AND try to come into Canada carrying a bottle of shampoo that is larger then 4 ounces (Imperial that is! Wonder what it would be in millilitres? ), you'll be sent to a work camp up in the high arctic where you'll be forced to hand-craft Inukshuks for purchase by tourists that are not hardened criminals and thus will be allowed into Canada.
You have been warned!
I've been using Pegasus for over a decade. Still do.
But unless David changes his mind, it looks like the writing will be on the wall.
Thunderbird might be an alternative, but it still can't do some simple things, AFAIK:
1) Display multiple open folders at once
2) Let you select text in an email and only quote the selected text in a reply.
I converted my wife to use TBird a few months ago, and she's more or less OK with it. But she misses some Pegasus features as well.
I think I'll hold off till the dust settles and a new release of TBird comes out. Then I may have to bite the bullet if things haven't changed.
It'll be a shame. Pegasus has served me well for a very long time.
This is wonderful news. The Russians can join the Konverts from Kansas and increase the ranks of the Pastafarians.
Anyone have this kid's (or the Russian Court's) mailing address? I want to send them a copy of the holy text The Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
May they be Touched by His Noodly Appendage.
Ramen!Why bother with RDBMSes at all?
;-)
Skip a generation and go with a good XML DBMS. Something like eXist perhaps?
I'm not sure I agree with your causal connections. Most good/natural "leaders" never become project managers in the first place. It's not an attractive career option. I've never seen a project manager rise to upper management ranks, probably for just that reason.
A project manager tends to be a twilight zone position. Really knowledgeable business or technical people are not interested, and have other career paths. So PM's rarely have good knowledge of the domain that they are supposedly managing. In fact, I would suggest that in the IT world, many PM's are failed techies, that couldn't cut it doing "real work", or good techies that hit a ceiling in the career path, switched to PM for the opportunity, but have no/little leadership talent, are now obsolete technically (ie no longer knowledgeable), and having instantiated their own version of Peter Principle hell, are very unhappy. Extremely talented techies rarely want to become PM's and if they do, usually bail out pretty quickly, since they don't find it very satisfying.
Good managers don't become PM's because that would be a step down the food chain.
So a PM is typically not good or knowledgeable about the domain, nor do they have good management skills (typically a poor attempt at a synonym for leadership). I'm sure there are exceptions to this rule...but I have yet to meet one.
Though there is a germ of truth in your comment, though not quite as you laid it out. Good leaders (at any level or in any discipline) are extremely valuable and also quite rare, so why in the world would they or their companies want them to be PM's. Doesn't typically happen. QED.
But the exec managers want to delegate and treat people like robot automatons. They are deluded in thinking that is productive or a good path to success, but regardless, they then delegate to the "professional" PM's who then continue to foster the delusion to the next level. Self-fulfilling prophecies.
I don't much believe that there is any such thing as "management of people". You can motivate, inspire, lead, cajole, sell and even threaten (though that is counterproductive as a consistent approach). But you can't "manage" a human being. They have free will, and most will exercise it...many times covertly to your detriment if they smell you are trying to "manage" them. Managing is a dirty word....it conjures images of manipulation, coercion and worse, by it's very nature.
People are messy as thus is leadership. It's an art....not a skill you can acquire from a book (PMBOK) or in a course. You can only learn it in the SOHK (school of hard knocks) and by mentoring/example.
Funny thing...I used to think that to assemble (and inspire) a hotshot team, you needed top-notch, hot-shot resources. Experience has caused me to rethink that. An exceptional leader (notice, I didn't say manager, nor project manager), can take a solid, but average group of individuals, and and inspire them to productivity and greatness that would boggle your mind. Maybe that's because most organizations are a mediocre grey (the law of averages virtually guarantees that in larger organizations) and it doesn't take that much to stand out. But you only need that little productivity/inspiration/perspiration uplift to work miracles, and blow away your competition in the process.
Which brings me to my last point. Unless you are a mature student with a long history of business experience behind you, I doubt that you have much in the way of leadership skills. It's not something they teach you in school or something that can be learned in a Bachelor's curriculum (which explains why so many MBA's are so useless and cause so much damage through their hubris). Real world experience counts. Not much else does when it comes to leadership, though I do admit there are some rare folks that have a natural talent for leading and inspiring.
That being said, the abysmal level of PM's in general, means that you are probably correct in saying "I could do it better than most". B
Heaven help us from more Project Managers.
I have yet to meet one that I consider competent. Though I have heard fairy tales of such mythical beasties actually existing.
The push towards ever more (incompetent) PM's stems from a lack of leadership in the executive suite and the common misconception (or desire) that people are fungible resources, that can be plugged and played at will. Exec Management in many companies (especially the large ones) have no concept of leadership, and thus they promote a mechanistic approach to management, which manifests in their hiring ever more PMs and delegating responsibility down to them.
Ever seen a project manager that could be labelled a "project leader"? I haven't. Yet. And I'm not holding my breath.
PM's, at least the accredited ones, worship the PMBOK (Which would be better acronymized as the PMFOC, IMO). Seen any mention of a PMBOL (Book of Leadership)? That'll be the day.
Unfortunately, I see no end to this approach. It's only going to get worse, till everything crumbles. Offshoring is just another symptom of higher management's abdication of leadership and the treatment of people as commodity components.
My 2 cents worth.
> digital workflow is a savior for many professionals
And enthusiastic, serious amateurs and semi-pros like myself.
I've always loved making images, for decades (yeah, I'm an olde phart). But I wasn't doing much photography only a few years ago, for the sake of making art. It was just too much of a pain, taking stuff to the lab, waiting, and more so than anything, not having end to end creative control.
I used a small Nikon Coolpix digital in conjunction with my film SLR for a few years, and loved it. The film stuff was rarely pulled out. Then I took the plunge about 2.5 years ago and went full digital with a Nikon D100 DSLR, all new glass, Epson 2200 printer and Photoshop-based workflow.
That step was the best thing I could have done for my photography. It rekindled my enthusiasm. Since then I've taken 12K frames...which is more than I probably shot in all the decades before that. As a result of this practice, my skills have improved dramatically.
I donated my film gear to a friend's neice who wanted to get into photography, but would never be able to afford a DSLR due to her age (quite young).
So yeah, digital was definitely a saviour in my case.
Ever seen how fast lab-processed snaps fade and colour shift in albums?
I'll take a good pigment-based, inkjet print on archival paper any day. Sure it's a bit more trouble....but then I can do it in the comfort of my own home office, without having to drive to a lab and without any delay. should I so choose.
As for keeping their "valuable once-in-a-lifetime" snaps intact for more than a few years, given the abysmal lack of photographic sensibility that most "morons" (to use our term) have, maybe this is a feature and not a bug?
On the plus side, the digital explosion has prompted the unwashed masses to take many more photos, and in many case, one can hope that more practice will lead to better photos, at least for some.
I find it amusing, on a high-tech forum like /., how many photographic luddites have surfaced to extol the virtues of film and decry the advancement of digital photography. But that amusement on my part is incidental and solely based on personal beliefs and prejudice, very much like most of the opinions expressed here, which try to masquerade as facts.
The tool is irrelevant. The result is what matters. I judge someone's photography by the appeal of their prints, their artistic sensibilities, their composition skills, the emotional impact the image has on me and the like. Doesn't much matter whether the photographer used a home made pinhole camera, 35mm film, med/lg format, DSLR or high-resolution scanning back.
Once it's printed, most people can't tell what technology was used.
The most critical piece of equipment is the "i" behind the camera. Most people can't take a decent photo (from an artistic perspective, personal snaps excluded) even if given a F5 or 1DS MkII (or better).
That being said, I'll put some of my photography up against anyones. And until recently, I was exclusively DSLR at 6mp. Now I'm up to 10 and even happier.
Bottom line, pixel peeping (or film grain peeping if you must) is boring. Get thee hence and create beautiful images cause everything else is just technological masturbation.
Some of my stuff can be found at: Tarafrost Photography, for those that might be interested.
Anyone spot the amusing similarity between IPOd and iPOD?
Must be a Microsoft conspiracy! Man the battlements....load the cannons!
I disagree with your conclusion as to why this is so. Very few labs process raw for any manufacturer, so the bulk of photographers that shoot raw, post-process it till it's "just right", save it as a Photoshop PSD if need be, then convert to jpeg before they send to the lab, since by then there would be no extra value to be had in sending the raw format.
As a semi-pro photographer, I want and love the control that digital gives me. No more depending on the lab tech's "opinion" on what the white balance should be, or how the print should look. Most pros are using an end-to-end colour managed workflow which obsoletes the need for having the lab do this.
Already done. Check out Dave Coffin's dcraw code available here:
dcraw
But he's in Mass. But there are copies of the code outside of the US already, so Pandora is free and won't go back in her box no matter what.
I wonder if we should start referring to "coffin" in Nikon's nail now?
Nikon needs to get a clue and give us, their customers (I have a lot of $'s tied up in Nikon DSLR gear, and Photoshop/etc. too) what we want. Documented RAW formats and/or support of an open raw standard like DNG.
...for a paltry half million bucks. Canadian even!
Damn....I knew I shouldn't have bought that kegorator (fridge with a tap) for my garagemahal last month.
Oh well...if it ain't broke I ain't gonna fix it, since the beer is cold, wet and tasty!
I'm just trying to imagine a case mod that would harness this technique to power the latest and greatest gaming machine. Hmmmm....
Might be a bit awkward having to sit 'n flush just to keep fraggin' your favourite alien foes!
...you can marry a same-sex partner in Canada, and no-one will blink at the throught.
In fact, many Americans come to Canada to get hitched for just that reason.