Friday, August 6, 2010

Thanks!

I just finished writing emails back to everyone who emailed in ideas and suggestions for how I could improve the Open SciCal, and questions about the hardware. Over the next couple days, I have a LOT of projects to work on, and a lot of examples... I don't know how I'm going to sleep, there's so much to do... and it's already 4:40 am as I write this, and I haven't slept a bit.

But first, before I start those projects, I really wanted to thank the folks at Wired, Gizmodo, and Make for giving the Open SciCal so many hits and so much attention... it was so much, in fact, that the poor little server that hosts Liquidware slowed down to a halt with all the pagehits, and had to be rebooted.

I certainly learned a decent amount about server uptime and cache overflow errors.

Most importantly, though, I have a notebook now, filled with requests, ideas, programs people would like to see running on it, hacks for the hardware, etc. That's the fun part of Open Source - I probably wouldn't have come up with a fraction of that on my own, and now Will, Chris, Justin, Mike, John, and I are going to have a blast writing all these features into the app software and giving them back as improvements to the Open SciCal.

Thanks again...




Now I feel I need to comment on that last one... Nerd Excalibur. Ok, that's pretty funny... so I typed "nerd excalibur" into Google images to see what I'd find, and this was the first picture:

"Aye, program in TI-BASIC and you my die before your app finishes. Use R and you'll live... to see another function. And dying in your beds, many years from now, would you be willing to trade ALL the transcendental functions, from Sine to ArcTangent, for one chance, just one chance, to come back here and tell other calculators that they may take our math functions, but they'll never take... OUR SOURCE CODE!"

Insert rowdy adrenaline cheers from face painted hardware hackers and electrical engineers...

I could live with that I guess :-)

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

It's funny how Gizmodo starts with "Who needs Texas Instruments?".

Matt said...

Just a bit ironic, I think, given the BeagleBoard underneath it runs on the ARM OMAP... that TI makes... oh well, I guess it's safe to say they make nice processor chips?

Rich said...

While I congratulate you on what you've done with the BeagleBoard and "r", I must admit that many of us here cannot afford to spend more than $350 on an open-source [Toy, Hobby, Addition]. Yes, it's neat to see people do cool projects with a more powerful system, but please keep in mind that many of us, myself included, are weekend open-source hackers. An Arduino costs $30, not $300. For 10% of what a Beagleboard would cost, I'm forced to live with this economic reality. (Ever try explaining why you "need" to buy just one more sensor to your wife?) Please, more "Toyota" level projects, and fewer "Lexus" boards? Thanks!

Anonymous said...
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Matt said...

@Rich - ok ok, deal. yeah... me too, i'm mostly a late night and weekend hacker. i've got a couple tricks up my sleeve with the arduino... :-) i'll post some of my projects after the weekend's over, and into next week.

Matt said...

@王雅吳玉婷奇 - you win the award for consistently delivering link spam to every one of my blog posts! sheesh... you are insistent.

Madrang said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
Matt said...

@madrang - if you'd like, shoot me an email at inthebitz at gmail... i've tried a number of similar boards, and can definitely give you a lot of my own personal experiences with each of them...