Tuesday, July 21, 2009

New Logo for Locusts?

I have for some time now been searching for a nice picture of a grasshopper to use as a logo for the Locusts project that I am working on. I never found one that I was satisfied with though, but yesterday I got lucky. While I was out walking in Lappeenranta this little fellow was sitting on the side of the road - and he really liked being photographed.

B.t.w., I edited this image using Pixelmator to remove the background. This little app is really turning out to be an excellent image editor - who needs Photoshop anyway? :-)

Friday, July 17, 2009

Excited about Scavenger...

Just wanted to let you know that I have posted something about Scavenger on my "work" blog. I have conducted some benchmarks of Scavengers parallel processing abilities and it is looking very promising I must say.

Wednesday, July 15, 2009

Making your OS X hostname stick

If you are both a Mac user and a terminal junkie, as I am, you will probably have noticed that your computers hostname changes whenever you enter a new network environment[1]. More precisely, when you join a network through a DHCP server in some cases it also assigns you a new hostname. This has been a major annoyance to me for some time now, so I finally decided to find out how to make my hostname stick. And, as it turns out, that is of course quite simple to do:

1) Issue the command "sudo vi /etc/hostconfig"
2) Add the line HOSTNAME=my-hostname to this file (pressing i to enter edit mode).
3) Save and close (that's Esc to quit editing mode, and then :wq + Enter for you vi rookies)

The HOSTNAME line may already exist on your system in which case its value will be "-AUTOMATIC-". In that case you just replace that with your hostname. It was not there on my Leopard (client) machine.

Oh yeah, thanks to Robert Brewer for teaching me how to do this. Take a look at his article if you are interested in getting some more detailed information about the whole hostname determination business on OS X.

[1]: For those of you not used to using a terminal a new command-line in a terminal typically starts with "username@hostname:top-level-path$". E.g., my prompt right now shows "madsk@leela:Development$".

Monday, July 13, 2009

Scavenger tutorial available

I have finally gotten around to writing some documentation of Scavenger, so that others may in fact start writing Scavenger-enabled applications. I have spent the entire day updating the wiki pages of Scavengers GoogleCode homepage so now you will find a tutorial there along with some other related information about scavenger. Enjoy!

Friday, July 10, 2009

Python in the Android Emulator

I have recently started playing around with the Android platform; more specifically I have begun experimenting with Python development on Android through the Android Scripting Environment (or ASE, as its called).

In ASE you are able to run Python 2.6.2 scripts that, as far as I can tell so far, have full access to the underlying Python libraries. Furthermore, through the "android" module, you gain access to some Android specific things like location services, sensor data, sms messaging, and more.

One problem with ASE though is the fact that it is impossible to run a Python program within the Android Emulator. When you try to start a Python script all you get is a black screen. This is due to some sensor-thingy not being available in the emulator, and the suggested fix is to rebuild ASE with the sensor service disabled.

To spare others of the pain involved rebuilding ASE from source (it is really not that hard, just takes some valuable time away from coding in Python), I will share my build of ASE that actually works in the emulator. You can download it here: ASE Emulator build (do not use this on a real device!). This build is provided as is; I will not be held liable if it blows up your computer, burns down your house, or runs away with your wife ;-)

Tuesday, July 7, 2009

Scavenger demo application released!

I have just released the first Scavenger demo app: AugIM - the Augmented Image Manager. AugIM is an old demonstrator that I made a long time ago, and now I have ported it to use Scavenger for its cyber foraging tasks.


AugIM is an image browser/editor for Maemo (running on Nokia's N800/N810 devices) that allows you to do simple image manipulation tasks such as sharpening, resizing, adjusting color/contrast/brightness, rotating, flipping etc. It also allows you to share your images with the world through email or Google Picasa Web. The N800 and N810 devices are capable of performing these services on their own, but it takes a long time for them to do so and it consumes a very large amount of energy. Using Scavenger, AugIM makes sure that heavy processing is offloaded to larger surrogates whenever possible, which means that the image manipulation tasks are performed faster and using less energy on the mobile device.

Yet another Scavenger build...

I have just uploaded a new self-contained Scavenger daemon build to Scavengers Google Code page. This build is for Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) and it contains the same components as the Ubuntu Linux version I released yesterday.

From your Mac simply download the archive, unpack it, and start the start_daemon script from a terminal. Then a Scavenger daemon should be running on your machine, and you are ready to start playing with cyber foraging! :-)

Monday, July 6, 2009

Scavenger build available for Ubuntu 9.04

I have finally gotten around to creating a Scavenger build that you can use to easily experiment with Scavenger, without having to install Stackless Python and other dependencies (e.g., Presence).

The build, which is created and tested to run on Ubuntu 9.04, is available here. All you need to do is 1) download the archive, 2) unpack it, and 3) run the "start_daemon" script.

The "bundle" contains Stackless Python 2.6.2, the Presence python lib and daemon, PIL (Python Imaging Library), Google Data API, and the Scavenger daemon.