Yay! My PandaBoard arrived on Monday! Woot! Apologies for the late post for it, but you can see the unboxing photos here.
Unfortunately, it turns out I don't have all of the parts I need to even make it boot -- apparently you have to have a serial port and an SD card setup to make it work. While I bought a brand new 16GB SD yesterday, my serial dongle seems to have walked off somewhere. When I get some time (probably tonight or tomorrow) I'll have a review up about the hardware, but for now, the unboxing photos will have to suffice.
Well, it's happened -- I've finally recieved my Pandora via UPS today! It's an interesting machine, indeed. Has a bit of heft to it, but everything feels solid.
The package came in a slightly beat up cardboard box sealed up in a UPS plastic bag mailer. Not really surprising, if you know the project's history and beginnings. I imagine the lack of protection in the UPS mailer didn't help much as the parcel went through customs and overseas. Unboxing photos are after the break.
It's been a while since I've posted, but I just came across something rather interesting: a programming language called Groovy, which is supposed to make Java more palatable. So at work we had a quick presentation on the subject, and during said presentation I took some time to pull down Groovy and start hacking away while listening. In about fifteen minutes I had a fibonacci function running, and five minutes after that I had a simple mail delivery system setup. Here's the code:
class Letter {
def from
def to
def subject
def content
}
I've been hacking on a fairly recent app of mine -- one that my brother had the idea for first, and I decided to take up recently. He and I like to play Magic: The Gathering fairly often, but for obvious reasons we can't find a way to play it over the 'net. In fact, we looked into the Magic: The Gathering Online, but realized that we would end up spending nearly double our original investment just to buy and put together the same decks we liked to play with in the first place.
So my brother managed to come up with an idea for a 3D card game program -- one that basically just shows the cards, a deck, and handles sending the positions and such to the other end. Pretty simple, but a slight bit difficult.
For all those out there that know me, you probably know that my laptop is pretty dear to me -- I was pretty fussy when choosing it at the time I bought it. In the end, I settled on a Lenovo ThinkPad X200 because it was fast, light, solid, and most importantly, field servicable. I've had the thing for about three years now, and I can say that it really is one of the toughest laptops I've ever owned.
Unfortunately, it's broke right now.