Thursday, February 3, 2011

First update of the new year!

Well, happy new year to everyone! My year's been off to a hectic start with university, and my upcoming exams, so blogging has fallen a bit to the wayside. However, I'll be starting my semester break in a couple of weeks, and plan to work on a few little projects of mine during my time off. I plan to work on a few c++ programs from my (admittedly long) list of ideas, while getting comfortable with creating makefiles/installing C++ programs in Linux. From there I may choose an open-source project to develop for, but that depends entirely on how long it takes me to get comfortable with it all. I'm also toying with the idea of maybe playing around with some circuitry (something like Arduino boards, just without the enormous shipping costs from the US to Germany!). If anyone has a company/website they know of that has decent shipping costs, please post it below in the comments! Besides that, I plan to expand my knowledge of VHDL and Assembly in preparation for my second semester. I will, hopefully, mix the Assembly with my C++ programming, in order to leave room for actual relaxing. If anyone has a good book, or website, detailing on how best to go about using Assembly in C++, feel free to leave a comment as well. I also plan to write a few more tutorials for my blog during my time off, so requests are welcome.

As for new stuff I'm intrigued about: Honeycomb (Android 3.0), Gnome 3.0, Motorola XOOM tablet, Mass Effect 3, and an Android 2.2 update that should eventually arrive for my Motorola Milestone. I'm also hoping to upgrade my PC to a core i5-2400 3.1GHz processor, 4GB of DDR3 RAM, and (due to the new processor) a new USB 3.0-ready motherboard. I'm ideally looking to spend <400€, and if anyone has suggestions on motherboards, I'd be interested to hear them (the rest of the hardware I've pretty much already picked out). While I'm at it I may be replacing my computer's case. What I am curious about: Does anyone know how Windows 7 and ArchLinux handles massive hardware changes? I should assume Windows 7 will require a new activation, but Arch should just auto-detect the right drivers for most of the parts I'm planning on swapping out, right? Anything I should be on the look out for?

Also, if anyone has any suggestions as to projects I should look into, interesting snippets of code/news, or a book they recently read and enjoyed (or movie or TV show), feel free to leave me a comment, I'm always looking for new stuff to distract me from my work!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Maybe you may want to place a twitter button to your website. Just marked down this blog, however I had to do it manually. Just my 2 cents.