[RaspPi] Supercomputing with RaspPi / MPI

Prof. Simon Cox has written an awesome tutorial about turning multiple RaspPis into an "Supercomputer Cluster". He himself build an cluster of 64 RaspPis at the University of Southampton. I could not resist but rebuild his project - with the 3 "old" (256MB) Pis I got. It turned out to be an quite awesome and interessting experience, introducing myself to MPI (Message Passing Interface)  for the first time. You should definitly take a look yourself.

http://www.southampton.ac.uk/~sjc/raspberrypi/

MPI Cluster

Cyberwar - Just „Warcraft in Space?“

A presentation and (upcoming) paper which I wrote for an Seminar (Applied Informatics)

Cyberwar is a buzz word used widely in media
today, but the problem is no one really knows what it even means.
What is Cyberwar? What does Cyberwar include or imply? Is
it like real war - and if so, where does it take place? Which
corperations deliever the needed weapons and how do they
look like?

Download: Nico Maas - Cyberwar

[Win8] EEE PC 1015PN and Windows 8

I have been using my EEE PC 1015PN for nearly 2 years now, and I am quite satisfied with it. But after the release of Windows 8, I wanted to try it, too. So I decided to upgrade install from my Windows 7 Professional to Windows 8 Professional. Before this test, I made an Acronis Image, which turned out to be an really good idea. Installation itself needed about 1 1/2 hour, as I decided to upgrade and not start from scratch.

The first problem started to come up after going to the desktop and trying to change the brightness \ wifi connectivity by using the FN Keyboard Shortcuts: "Asus ACPI Driver missing", was the error. So I tried to reinstall the needed keyboard drivers, and Optimus Tool (1015PN uses an Intel as well as an NVIDIA Graphicscard).

After rebooting, I was able to choose the Optimus setting within the tool, and I could also change screen brightness with the FN Keyboard Shortcuts - but nothing else.

So I decided to shutdown the PC, enable WIFI in the BIOS and reboot - to check WIFI Connectivity, as well as to see the Intel Graphics active in Windows 8. So I pressed the "Save and Reboot" shortcut in the bios -  and that was the last thing I saw.

After that, the EEE PC tried to boot once, and then stopped working, rebooting again - boot loop. But not after 20 seconds of boot, no, it already fried seconds after starting the boot process. Even disabling WIFI in BIOS again or pressing F8 manically - nothing could help. The system was killed.

After trying for a good amount of time, I restored the Windows 7 backup. And thats it. My first Windows 8 impression turned out to be even worse than Windows Vista. And well, that was something.