Learning new things keeps me sane. The reality is that it is hard work to learn new stuff and I am not that fond of new stuff. I am fond, though, of having learned new hard stuff. I am currently on a kick to upgrade my programming skills. A lot of programming is minutiae–a massive jigsaw puzzle of minutiae tied together with clever tricks and best practices that are not always obvious. Right after I arrived in Texas I worked on a webified version of my old GaugeCam project software. I did not get very far–just some user interface stuff, but I put it onto a little BeagleBone Black embedded computer that runs Xubuntu and serves the site from our little apartment. You can access the site by clicking here (not so much to see). The thing has been up and running for several months now. I am kind of amazed.
The upshot is that I thought I would change the focus of my learning effort a little, put up a second page on the same server and see if I could serve live images from two cameras and do some realtime image analysis all from this wimpy little embedded computer. I started on it last night. We will see if I get anywhere with it over the next few months.
