C[omp]ute

From: andrew cooke <andrew@...>

Date: Sat, 19 Nov 2011 09:59:04 -0300

For the last two months or so, I've been doing very little apart from working.
That has now ended and I need to get my life back.  Life that, in the past has
involved various computing projects.  But it's not clear what I should do.  So
I am writing myself this post as part of a process to discover / decide.


Motivation.  What do I think is important?

  - Any project should be fun.
  - If it helps me in my job, or in finding a new job, that is a plus.
  - Something politically meaningful would be good.
  - It should be realistic / achievable.
  - It should have potential - explore a field that is growing.


Possibilities:

  - Sort out my web pages.  This is a short term thing, but they are currently
    a mess: various links are broken; parti.cl needs to be shut down; etc.

  - Some kind of hardware hacking.  Arduino or Raspberry Pi.  One idea is an
    Arduino + wifi board that would accept streaming music from SquuezeServer
    (Logitech's media server) and play it over headphones (the headphone
    output from my Boom is annoyingly noisy).

  - Astronomy (or general) data processing using Hadoop.  This started with
    the idea of a pipeline, but thinking in the shower just now, it could also
    be run a single-machine.  Think of something like "make files" for data
    processing - a bit like pig, but with more smarts about dependencies, data
    provenance, and scripting.  So you would be able to ask the system to
    remake some final image given a change to (say) a flat field, or to ask
    what is the difference in processing between two sets of results.  A
    permanent storage of all your data and its history (with the ability to
    delete and regenerate intermediate stages as needed).

  - Continue with Lepl + RXPY integration.  One aim here is to have a fast,
    modern pypy regular expression implementation.

Andrew