Aint that special

Don’t get me wrong. The new MacPro is a great machine, but 1GB of RAM? Come on. In this day? So I immediately ordered another 2X512MB cards from Apple. The hard drive seems to be doing a lot of caching, and with such a silent machine, it is very obvious. Not to mention, it slows everything down. So I just received the email from Apple that the RAM has shipped. They originally said 1-3 weeks availability, and it took about 1 week. I’m hoping this stops some of the hard drive access. Especially for $300 for 1GB of RAM!
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Technorati Tags: Hardware, Mac

Science is actually pretty easy after 20 some years of training. I am a chemist by training and I find that there are few new surprises for me in the day to day. But recently I decided to learn how to program for the Mac. Back in 1987, I took a Fortran class, so I figure I’m ready to learn another language. I picked up a copy of the excellent book “Programming in Objective-C” (Stephen Kochan), I’ve been diligently reading it since then. Boy is programming tough. It is the minutia that throws me off. I guess I have become pretty good with the big picture thinking. Now I’m trying to learn how to increment a number by one. Well, I hope it is a better hobby than Taxidermy. At least the final product shouldn’t scare kids and old people.

Technorati Tags: Mac, Programming

I figure I could inaugurate my new MacPro by extending my bloging beyond my immediate family. Let’s start off with the new machine. IT IS FAST! I upgraded from a 17″ Powerbook G4 with some modifications. I had installed a 120GB perpindicular drive and 2GB of RAM in the powerbook. I thought I was screaming fast, but the new MacPro is amazing. I’ve already added two more hard drives. It took all of 15 seconds to pop in the new drives and another 20sec to format and I am up to 1.25TB of storage. I have a PC running Windows XP that I built running along side my new Mac. Let’s just say my Windows machine is gathering some dust now. I’m pretty bummed that Parallels does not work on the MacPro yet though. If it did, I would be selling my PC on ebay by now. If anyone is interested, the 2.6GHz machine is plenty beefy enough for the semi-pro user. I am scientist by training and use some heavy graphics on ocassion. The mac does just fine. But mostly I am an average Mac user and love iPhoto and Safari. Holy steaming cow-pies batman, this machine rocks.