The Embedded Angle

To be honest and straightforward I expected more from a book with title like Raspberry Pi Super Cluster . The author Andrew K. Denis has a very clear vision on the subject (like in his previous book Raspberry Pi Home Automation with Arduino , which I liked a lot) . He's done his best to deliver an exhaustive set-up while being concise at the same time, but it seems to me, this clearly is the wrong format for a book on the given topic. Stack Pis for parallel power Now having this book at hand, I finally got the chance to answer many of the questions I had about clustering, and how it can be applied to a set of Raspberry Pis. The first impression is that it is very well structured and gradual. Lets see, the first two chapters are short introductions to parallel computing (background history and the contemporary systems) and the initial set-up respectively. They're short and to the point. And that's the way it should be - it is presumed that if you're going paralle

This topic being approached exhaustively may become vast and is fit for at least a book. I'll have to keep it short and concise here, so I'll stick to a few key points: Java Runtime vs JDK - actually there is no discussion here - if you you intend to run programming projects you need the development kit, period. (It contains the runtime anyway.) Java 7  vs Java 8 (JDKs) - this could require some debate. Java 7 is the mature and default option to go with. Having around two years in production, it is the safer choice. Java 8 has been just released, and its shortcomings are still unknown. On the other hand Java 8 has numerous improvements to the language, and Oracle wouldn't approve it for release if it wasn't quite well tested. Another facet to be considered is that Java 7 is well presented in the repositories, while currently Java 8 have to be downloaded, installed and maintained (the regular updates - mostly for security reasons) all manually. Source examples - ne

Raspbian with PostgreSQL it is quite easy actually. Just like on Ubuntu/Linux Mint/... (Replace the ellipsis with any derivative of Debian or Ubuntu.) The hardest part is to decide which version of the database server to employ. On this page the full set of options for retrieving the server is given with the necessary amount of detail.     "Should I get it?" Actually, since PostgreSQL (together with MySQL) is one of the most popular open source databases within the Linux realm, some distributions choose to deliver it pre-installed on their releases. If you are not sure, if you need to get the server at all, this simple command can answer that question: $ ps aux | grep postgers It will search through the processes running on your system and filter them to leave only those bound to PostgreSQL. It is possible that the server is present on the system, but it is not running at the moment. In that case it is enough to see if its configurations are in place. The plac