To keep myself from forgetting the few coding skills I can still remember (from my embedded systems / control systems days), and to let me think about something other than Grid for a while, I dabble in a few home automation projects. One such project had me looking for a suitable replacement for my home control Linux box that moved on to a new life as a music server.There really isn’t a lot of heavy lifting that my home monitoring box has to do. Interface to my alarm system with a serial port, run a few cron tasks from time to time, aggregate the information and build a web page. That, and it also needs to act as my file server for backups.I started poking around and stumbled upon this. The NSLU2 is fondly referred to as “Slug” by those that have “unslung” it — and there is a whole community that has come into existence to take advantage of the fact that the Slug comes with some pretty cool Linux firmware that can be extended on. I bought one a while back (for something like $70 as I recall!), “unslung” it, added a few packages, and away I went. So what does this have to do with Grid … ?On the nslu2-linux Yahoo group that I try to stay up on, someone mentioned the possibility of a NSLU2 “Slug Cluster distributed over the Internet.” Well I don’t think the processing power of the Slug is going to win any “my cluster has more CPU power than yours contests,” but with the amount of storage only limited by the size of the USB drives (it has ports for two) that you can plug in, there may be some real potential here in the data grid category. That, and it shows that Grid ideas are permeating to ever smaller, and cheaper targets.Sorry, I gotta go, by the pattern flashing on the LEDs of my Slug, I think it just discovered the existence of extraterrestrial life… Technology Industry