This last weekend, I spent most of the weekend taking Grandpa Milo and Grandma Sarah around and working on the learning/development stuff I have described here over the last few weeks. It has felt like I have been trying to drink through the proverbial fire hose in an effort to learn too much stuff at once, so I have started to break it up into bite-size chunks. When I did that, I realized I needed to do some infrastructure work before I even started. So this weekend, I decided to spend most of my time getting set up to work rather than invest a lot of time in learning. I held to that for the most part; the exception being that I started in on a set of tutorials on how to use GIT.

So, here is what I did:

  • Decided to use DropBox as a way to back up and share a bunch of stuff (bought a tera-byte for a year).
  • Set up a web server with WAMP on the new (cheap) desktop computer we had Fry’s make for us (on a special).
  • Made it available from other places with the help of Duck DNS (awesome free service).
  • Added an ftp server to that.
  • Installed Ubuntu LAMP server on the old desktop (32-bit x386)
  • Set up a GIT repository on that.
  • Made it available in other places with Duck DNS
  • Installed R and RStudio on all the computers
  • Went through the first third of a GIT tutorial because I am so pathetic at that. It was great and I am up and going now.
  • Added Qt, Qt Creator and OpenCV to the Linux server
  • Added XMing to my laptop
  • Learned how to SSH to the Linux box to perform code testing remotely

Next, I am going to start working up the learning curve on Machine Learning with R and continue to code on my previous projects. All-in-all, it was a great weekend. Lorena and I even went out to eat a couple of times. Now, all I have to do is start working in a few walks and my life might arrive at a sense of normalcy again.

Betty Blonde #303 – 09/15/2009
Betty Blonde #303
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