Google Cloud Platform

Getting a computer to see and understand stuff is hard. Way hard. Like, hard for a long time. For a bit of context, slide 15 seems to be the definitive abbreviated history, dating all the way back to 1966. If you want to dig into the details, there’s a free Udacity course on computer vision offered by Georgia Tech. However, you can add computer vision and intelligence capabilities to your applications without the deep understanding of machine learning by using Google Cloud Vision....

In the last few entries on creating a containerized Minecraft server, we created the container, launched the server, moved data to a volume, created regular backups of our world, took a look at customizing the server’s properties, and updated changes to the container. Right now, our setup is pretty solid! So, let’s get to that fun and impractical thing I mentioned that we’d be doing with Kubernetes. Lego® representation of a Minecraft mooshroom in a mushroom biome...

Last time, I said that in the next entry in this series I would do something fun (and likely impractical) with kubernetes. I lied; sorry. Since then, I received several great questions that I didn’t manage to cover, so I thought that I’d address a couple of them now. This entry will be rather piecemeal, but hopefully much shorter than the prior ones! Customizing the server.properties file The start of accidental PVP harm...

This is Part II in a series on running a Minecraft server in a container on Google Cloud Platform. If you missed Part I, make sure to glance over it for context. Last time Last time, you took an existing application (a modded Minecraft server) and containerized it, using the Debian base image. You used a Google Cloud Platform container-optimized image to build our image and run the resulting container on Google Compute Engine (GCE)....

I only started playing Minecraft a couple of years ago, and rage quit after I set my house on fire due to a misunderstanding of lava dynamics. It reentered my life when I saw an article on qCraft, a mod that incorporates elements of quantum physics into gameplay. From there, I discovered the amazing world of Minecraft mods, accompanied by YouTube videos and collections on imgur showing off creations....

This is the third part of the Julia on Google Compute Engine (GCE) series. The first entry discussed how to set up Julia on a standard GCE instance, and the second walked through working with Google Cloud Storage from within a Julia program. In this entry, we’ll be diving a little deeper into Julia, and talk about parallel processing. Setting up your instance (reprise) This is when your machine type matters a bit more....

This is the second part of the Julia on Google Compute Engine (GCE) series that I started a few weeks back. The first entry addressed how to set up Julia on a standard GCE instance, and how to run simple scripts. Today, we’ll be doing less with Julia, and more with setting things up so you can efficiently write Julia programs and scripts, and make it easy to get the results of your computations....

This blog entry is part one of a series on using Julia with Google Compute Engine. It was inspired by a bit of narcissism, a burning passion for scientific computing, and lackluster experiences with other comparable languages. I recently had the opportunity to answer a question about running Julia on Google Compute Engine (GCE), and thought I’d dust off this half-finished blog entry to round it all out. In this entry, we’ll focus on installing Julia on a GCE instance....