AWS is now an $8Bn business for Amazon. Could anyone have predicted that in 1997 or even 2007? This week I was talking to a few people about who might be able to disrupt AWS. It won’t be easy. We immediately discounted the old guys like HP, IBM, Dell etc and even Google seems to be a complete also-ran in IaaS. Microsoft Azure might have potential. PaaS is separate as it’s higher up the stack and makes use of IaaS. »
Stop reading now. Blogpost no longer valid. For some odd reason, Google and others stopped auto-generating armhf binaries of Chromium last year. Version 37 was the last one I could find. Luckily the Ubuntu guys have been building it all along and their version 45 installs really easily on the all-new Debian/Raspbian Jessie on your Raspberry Pi 2. This was a surprise as this kind of thing usually degenerates into dependency hell. »
As an old Embedded guy who actually cares about resource usage, I’ve been bothered for quite a while by the number of trivial Node.js projects out there that require a full-blown MongoDB or MySQL server to operate. It’s a particular problem on the Raspberry Pi or small DigitalOcean Droplets. In many cases a simple SQLite DB or TingoDB is more than sufficient. If your Web App has 2 registered users and 100 visitors per day, may just maybe you don’t need MongoDB or MySQL. »
ZeroMQ is a lightweight messaging library and looks ideal for lower powered devices like the RPi. Building and running is pretty easy. These are really just notes for myself for future reference. I don’t actually need a messaging system yet but I wanted to play around with one. Running a simple Request / Reply setup with Node.js on both Windows 10 and RPi was interesting. One advantage a message queue gives you over REST is that the receiver can be out of action and still get all transmitted messages when it recovers. »
We had friends over from the US last weekend and their kids loved my Printrbot 3D printer. They had learned Tinkercad in school so that’s what they used to create things so they could print them out. They are now hounding their parents for a printer. Oops :-) But I noticed a “Download to Minecraft” option in Tinkercad and finally just had a chance to try it out. Wow! It’s incredibly easy. »
Now that the Espruino Pico has (beta) HID support, it can pretend to be a keyboard or mouse (or other HID compatible device). This makes it possible to send characters to the active window on your Windows/Linux/Mac PC. I’ve cobbled together some code which turns the Pico into a device like a YubiKey. Press the button and get the latest auth code pasted automatically for you. This code is basically just from three sources, merged together with a few tiny tweaks by me. »
I compiled both on a Banana Pi for a change. Nothing special for the 0.12 build, and ./configure –without-snapshot for the 0.10 build. “make test” threw up the usual 7 minor errors or so. I ran both Banana Pi and Raspberry Pi 2 without any immediate obvious issues. Enjoy. node-v0.10.40-linux-arm-v7.tar.gz node-v0.12.7-linux-arm-v7.tar.gz node v0.10.40 release notes node-v0.12.7 release notes mkdir nodetemp cd nodetemp wget https://d2j17b10ywb1i7. »
I swore I’d never use another Yahoo product after the cultural terrorism of their Geocities shutdown. Now one of their few bright lights of the past decade, Pipes, is biting the dust. However a very very smart person wrote a program called pipes2js three years ago which you may find useful. It converts your Pipes to Node.js apps! Installation is a tiny bit different from the instructions as it doesn’t seem to be on NPM any more. »
I’ve been Snarky McSnarkenstein about Windows 10 IoT on Raspberry Pi for quite a while. When it was originally announced, everyone seemed to think they were getting full-blown Windows for free on Pi. Many still think this. What you actually get is a GUI-less version of Windows on to which you can deploy Universal Apps (and others). So unlike Raspbian on Pi, you can’t actually develop on it, you have to have full Windows 10 running somewhere else to develop, compile, deploy and debug. »
As with Node 0.12.0 and 0.12.1, there are no-precompiled ARM versions of 0.12.2 on the main site. I’ve built for Pi 1 (ARM v6) and ODROID-C1/Pi2 (ARM v7). The latter was built on an ODROID-C1 and it seems to run fine on the Pi 2 since both are ARM v7. It took 1 hr 15 mins to compile compared to 4+ hrs on the Pi 1. “make test” on the ODROID gave the same results as on the Pi 1: [10:33|% 100|+ 784|- 4]: Done »