+danyq [hi dany!]
On Feb 17, 2016, at 12:55 AM, Toby Schachman wrote:
Also, the "Slack in the World" idea is a mashup of two of RMO's projects: the one where he put receipt printers on all the desks, and the Burning Man one where he hooked the keyboard directly to the receipt printers. We decided that one of the reasons the receipt printers on all the desks didn't catch on was due to the screen interface to create new messages. Bret thinks just having keyboards hooked up directly would work better.
Agreed! The
typewriters were a big hit. Everyone wanted to type on them.
Last night, I met with a very dear friend who was passing through Berlin. He’s a postdoc researcher at the University of Cambridge, and wrote
a full TLS implementation in OCaml in a
unikernel called
MirageOS. Yesterday, he told me that Mirage was now running on embedded devices, specifically, on a thing I hadn’t heard of yet called the
Cubieboard. It all sounds very exciting:
• The Desert Journalism typewriters were fun to program—Dany and I (mostly Dany) had the euphoria of programming without an operating system. It feels great! Things start up instantly and your program never stutters because something else you don’t understand is happening. But: it also hugely limits complexity. Unikernels seem to address this tradeoff very well.
• Mirage is using the Cubieboard instead of the Raspberry Pi because the former supports hardware virtualization interrupts. That’s fairly specific reason, but it also looks like the Cubieboard supports OpenGL and lots more things that the Pi doesn’t. I wonder what boot-times are for a unikernel on the Cubieboard.
I’d love to be in the loop re: room hardware investigations.
-RMO