Beautiful Butterflies

Raspberry Pi

The Raspberry Pi is a credit-card sized computer that plugs into your TV and a keyboard. It’s a capable little PC which can be used for many of the things that your desktop PC does, like spreadsheets, word-processing and games. It also plays high-definition video.  To learn more, check out the following sites:

http://www.crunchbase.com/company/raspberry-pi-foundation

and

http://techcrunch.com/2012/10/21/getting-started-with-the-raspberry-pi-is-not-as-easy-as-pie/

JSLINT

JSLint is a JavaScript program that looks for problems in JavaScript programs. It is a code quality tool.  It is modeled after the "C" language lint tool and may be found @ http://www.jslint.com/lint.html

MapReduce Book

The book "MapReduce Design Patterns" by Donald Miner and Adam Shook is a good intermediate resource on MapRedue.

Each pattern is explained in context, with pitfalls and caveats clearly identified to help avoid common design mistakes when modeling large data architecture. It also provides a complete overview of MapReduce that explains its origins and implementations, and why design patterns are so important. All code examples are written for Hadoop.  They are:

• Summarization patterns: get a top-level view by summarizing and grouping data
• Filtering patterns: view data subsets such as records generated from one user
• Data organization patterns: reorganize data to work with other systems, or to make MapReduce analysis easier
• Join patterns: analyze different datasets together to discover interesting relationships
• Metapatterns: piece together several patterns to solve multi-stage problems, or to perform several analytics in the same job
• Input and output patterns: customize the way you use Hadoop to load or store data

This book does not have the step-by-step instructions of a "recipe" book, thus avoiding line-by-line breakdowns and delivering a lot of content in its 436 pages. (There is also a usable summary in 30 or so pages.)

Combinatorial and Pairwise Testing

The (US) National Institute of Standards and Technolgy is developing tools to support combinatorial testing. No license is required and there are no restrictions on distribution or use. If you would like a copy, just send them an email request to kuhn@nist.gov.  The site is @ http://csrc.nist.gov/groups/SNS/acts/index.html

Eerie Robots

One is Jules -- built by Hanson Robotics -- can be seen at http://bcove.me/3v0d3oop. In the video clip our humanoid friend asks whether he will dream when he is shut down.

Another developed at Osaka University has been designed to replicate the facial expressions of a model. "I felt like I had a twin sister," the model was quoted as saying after the demonstration (http://bit.ly/dfXY3j).

Systems Engineering Body of Knowledge

The Systems Engineering Body of Knowledge (SEBoK) version 1.0 is available @ http://www.sebokwiki.org/1.0.1/index.php?title=Main_Page.  Check it out!