Robots invade kitchens in Portugal

Here's an interesting article about practical application of robotics in the home that's developing a strong demand and following in Portugal and Europe. Not available in the U.S. yet, but I think it will likely do well here, too.

Google solidly plants its stake in Robotics

Search may have sparked Google's beginning but it's now moving hard and fast into Robotics. With this week's acquisition of Boston Dynamics, and several earlier Robotics related acquisitions, Google is positioning itself as a major player in the field.

Scary? Perhaps. I find it somewhat anxiety-raising when one large company moves to put itself in the significant position to call the shots - hopefully they'll remember that motto, "Do no evil!"

Removing old Ubuntu kernels easily

Ubuntu doesn't automatically remove old kernel packages, so over time the number of unused kernel packages will build up. On recent releases, you could manually use the graphical UI of the Synaptic Package Manager (SPM) to locate and remove the old packages, but as of the Ubuntu Saucy Salamander release the SPM is no longer available.

However, there's a neat way to do it directly from the command line or a shell script, too. See this Ubuntu Forum article for details.

Registering Oracle Java using alternatives on CentOS 6

If you want to add the Oracle JDK to a CentOS 6 box, one easy way is to download the JDK RPM package, and use the rpm(8) command to install it easily, like this:

$ sudo rpm -ivh jdk-7u45-linux-i586.rpm

But chances are the newly installed JDK will not be visible at the command line, especially if the openjdk is already present. How to fix this? You'll have to use the alternatives(8) command to manually register the Oracle JDK. See the instructions on the if-not-true-then-false site for details. I recommend following the "Use Java JDK latest version" example.