1. Working and Working on LEGO Mindstorms EV3

    Presentation Space at a Networking Event for Educators

    Since October I am working at the Leipzig University of Applied Science as a researcher and project manager in a robotics project. The project is called "Roberta" and is aimed at young people, specifically girls and young women. With consumer-grade robotics sets, like LEGO Mindstorms, we try to get them excited about robotics, computer science and STEM in general. What we're doing is working with educators to get this project to schools.

    I am doing project management but I am also doing research and testing the limits of what we can do with those robots. Not from an engineering (or software engineering) perspective. I am not throwing C-code at the machines.

    "programming"

    The EV3 Bricks (the brain of the LEGO Mindstorms EV3) are running a small Linux. Using the original proprietary LEGO Mindstorms programming software is a bit lacking. You use the graphical interface to create a flow-graph that describes the actions the robot should take. Sadly, this language doesn't support variable scoping (meaning that every variable is global) and only support non-recursive functions. Indirect recursion is prohibited as well (no tricks!). That's no fun.

    Alternatively there are multiple (two) alternative Linux-based operating systems. I have yet to try the other one, but the first one is basically a Linux with an embedded JavaVM. This is usually used to, well, program Java. I've tried that and it's boring because Java is boring. But having the JVM is, even with 300Mhz and 64MB RAM, pretty powerful.

    I've tried to run Jython on the brick but there wasn't enough memory to do it. Using a USB Stick formatted as swap I was able to get it to run, but it took almost an hour to even start the repl. Running any actual code took prohibitively long.

    16GB of additional very slow main memory ought to be enough for everybody

    But Clojure also runs on the JVM and this worked quite nicely. The next article will be about me, running Clojure on a LEGO Mindstorms Ev3.

  2. Writing a Master's Thesis

    Before I write about the topic my master's thesis touched, I wanted to look at how my writing was going. After six months of writing and about a year of research, the thesis ended up clocking in at 18120 words. That's a thousand words more than Shakespeare's Macbeth. Who would've thought.

    Here is my writing progress illustrated:

    As we can see, we have a slow start with long fits of unproductivity, picking up the pace in late August. But as it turns out, I did it.

  4. Attending GUADEC 2016

    This year I have the chance to attend GUADEC, the gnome user and developer conference in Europe. I am very much looking forward to it. This will be my vaccation this year. I surely hope Karlsruhe is up to it.

  5. Fedora 24 issues

    So I've been running Fedora 24 on my laptop for a bit and its not as nice as I would have hoped.

    First of all, Fedora was no longer under the impression that my device had a touchpad, which it most certainly does. This problem was fixed by moving from the GNOME X-session to the Wayland session. With Wayland, Chrome isn't maximized when it starts even though it thinks it is, but thats just a minor issue. the main problem is that with Wayland, my system no longer recognizes any but the native resolution of my display panel. This is, in itself, not a problem. But any attached projector is also only recognized with its native resolution, leading to the inability to clone the display across both the panel and the projector since they no longer have any resolution in common.

    So now I can decide between using my touchpad or a projector.

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