It was my birthday on Saturday and by pure luck my Raspberry Pi was delivered the day before - what a great day "hacking" (in the old sense of the word). I have been waiting for a few months for this delivery - What a treat!!  If you have not heard of this credit size computer before here is the back ground.

The Problem
In the UK, school information technology education has been pitifully reduced to Microsoft Word, Excel and Powerpoint. My own kids came home badly depressed as they started the classes as they knew far more than the teacher and were accused of cheating because they knew how to "cut'n'paste' !!  These lessons are not the way to develop the next generation of technologists, designers, developers and inventors.  So the Cambridge University set up the Raspberry Pi Foundation (see http://www.raspberrypi.org/about for more details) to make a small, cheap computer for every school kid to really learn about how computers actually work, writing programs, games and applications with the simple to Python as the educational language.

The Solution
So they designed the Raspberry Pi computer with:

Here is mine on the kitchen table:

Lust and Ideas
I looked at the specification and decided I just had to have one of these and especially as it is only around £25. Although meant for education I was think I could use one for Internet access in the kitchen, run a website, backup DNS server for the computer room, then there is ..... well you get the picture at these prices and functionally it opens the door to all sorts of new ideas - it's game changing and makes you think.

Coming to market
It was fun to watch this device come to market as the team generously shared progress. Then there was a series of "excellent mistakes" - perhaps you have not heard that term? But it comes from a very highly recommended book:

The team announced they would make an big announcement at 6 am that Friday - a classic Internet mistake:

Of course, every one was surprised by the interest level, which was expected to be a few hundred engineering samples. The distributors then decided they had better get the computers pass the CE electronics safe and radiation approval (starting 200,000 radio stations in the UK could be a real problem).  So the team set about getting CE Approved  and they did a fantastic job in a short time too.  They said there was one heart stopping moment when it failed to carry on running packets back and forth over the Ethernet - until they found it was the CE approved Ethernet switch on the desk that had failed!!

Then we had to patiently wait as the manufacturer ramped up production and the distributors work through the back log of orders.

Up and Running on the First Attempt
So I plug in the USB keyboard & mouse, Ethernet, and HDMI to a screens DVI (also tested the Video-S output to my TV). Downloaded the Debian Linux "Squeeze" release for ARM and burnt it to the 8GB SD card and applied the micro-USB power cable . Here's my set-up:

Note: the Microsoft mouse - they do make good mice :-)

You get the usual Linux start up messages and a login prompt in 24 seconds. Once you login typing "startx" gets you to a X Windows GUI. This is very impressive. There is a web browser called Midori that works well but you do notice it is a little slow due to the 700 MHz processor (the same as my mobile phone but, of course, that has a tiny screen) and does not have any advanced plug-ins (yet).  The user can't go mad with just 256 MB of memory so don't open up lots of browser Tabs.  This points out how complex a lot of web pages are these days with active rubbish like adverts and pointless movies at every corner. Another thing I noticed is how much better Linux is at interesting screen savers than Windows - it does show a lot more original thinking.

Give Back
This project is about education and inspiring the next generation, so what could I quickly do to add some value?

nmon for Raspberry Pi - for performance monitoring
Well, I do call myself "mr_nmon" on Twitter for a reason, so the first task was compiling up the latest Nigel's performance MONitor (version 14g)  - this might help developers understand the machine resources and help in some code optimising projects too.  I downloaded the code from my Source-forge site for nmon for Linux (http://nmon.sourceforge.net), then downloaded the Linux development library for ncurses and linked in the header file for ncurses.h and nmon compiled with zero issues and it all works too.  That is what Linux is all about - compatibility across hardware platforms. I have already uploaded the binary to Source-forge for others to download and just use. Then just for a laugh I tried the Debian command to look for nmon in the online repository and "blow me down" it is there but an older (not recommended version 13g): sudo apt-get install nmon - now I have to work out how to get that upgraded to the latest. Any one got an idea on how?

nweb for Raspberry Pi for a working tiny web server example
Next I thought I would compile and test up my tiny website server, which is used as a good way to learn how a webserver works by looking at the actual source code in C to get the basics working. The server only covers static pages and images but does include creating a daemon process disconnected to the user context that started it and lots of safety checks for a security plus logging.  This comes to just 200 lines of code and there is an article on DeveloperWorks (http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/systems/library/es-nweb/index.html). So I got the newly updated nweb code to the Raspberry Pi, compiled it and it just worked.  The compile command was: cc nweb.c and to run it was: sudo ./a.out 80 /home/pi  Then if you have a index.html file ready, you can remotely browse to the right IP address/hostname and see the webpage. I will have to get the new code on the nweb web page and the Raspberry Pi binary version available to others to learn the web server basics.  I have actually used nweb for real too, as it does not suffer with endless setup and configuration - it is just one binary file and its simplicity means security.

Here is nmon running:

Great fun with new Game Changing technology :-)

Then I got to thinking - full marks to the Raspberry Pi team, designers, manufactures, distributors and user community this is the beginning of something remarkable with 100's of project sparked off from this device. I will keenly watch the project and help were I can.

But IBM does some pretty cool technology too but it is very easy to take it for granted because much of it has been available for some time. Our POWER and AIX technology are another opportunity to think about making the most of the features and functions to maximise the benefits for us.

I gave a talk about IBM technology at the Norway Technical Event and quickly knocked up the below list of some of the POWER and AIX technology I use a lot and regularly talk about to customers.  The questions for customers are:

So here is the challenge - Are we all making the most from available technology or
are missing out on opportunities due previously badly thought-out decisions or not thinking about it at all!