Sunday, March 13, 2011

New Hardware

Last weekend I splurged and upgraded my Macbook Pro from the 2009 version to the latest 2011 version. Although there's no real differences aesthetically, the internal switch from the old Core 2 Duo processors to the new Sandy Bridge i5 processor has made a huge difference in compile/run times.

The only other bottleneck was the 5400 RPM hard drive, which I promptly switched to a 256 GB Sata III solid state drive. Even though OSX doesn't have TRIM support yet, I'm hoping the hard drive performance won't degrade too much before Lion is released in June (which should have built in third party TRIM support).

In terms of what I'm using the hardware for, I've been documenting what I've learned about Android programming over at code.google.com/p/wliu/ under the 'Wiki' section. I'm still not sure how to use collaborative software like github, but it doesn't really matter yet since I'm still a one man team.

Right now I'm working on the framework for a flashcard program; I figure I can study for my Medical Terminology class and learn how to program at the same time. There's a lot of possible neat twists on how people learn, but for now my goal is a simple working application. Basics first I guess.

1 comment:

  1. So, most of that I didn't understand, but sounds like you're excited which is good :) And Med Term flashcards would be great -- highly marketable I would think.

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