Acer AS3410-723G / Celeron 723

I’ve just benchmarked the Celeron 723 CPU (1.2Ghz , 800 MHz FSB).

Here are SuperPI results for 2M digits (power settings = high performance; nothing else running in the background but HW Monitor):

The CPU temperature never went above 45C:

I am happy with the purchase (got a discount at El Corte Ingles, ended up paying only 335 euros). I’ve fiddled for a few days with a standard Atom netbook: Packard Bell dot ZG6; it was nice, however, no Adobe Flash for HD movies (it did work but 1 frame/sec).

The price I payed puts this laptop into the netbooks range of Atom @ 1.6Ghz, 1Gb RAM, 160Gb hard drive, Intel 945 on 1024×600 – but is much responsive with 3Gb RAM, 250Gb hard drive and Intel 4500 MHD on 1366×768.

Not to mention the CPU which is now able to run Adobe Flash movies in 720p in the browser.

I also like the design: on all other laptops I saw, I had to remember -more or less- the location of USB ports or at least I had to look every time on the side of the laptop. On this model there are symbols drawn on the top part of the laptop, just above the ports themselves. Never miss the slot again!

Windows Experience Index is 2.8 (CPU is the limiting factor here – click to enlarge):

The HDMI output is a bonus. I feel a bit bad with a single core CPU, but on the other han, if it does the single job better than 2 core CPU (Atom) [I'm referring to Flash Player of 720p videos on Youtube], then it’s OK. I’m coming from E8500, Q9000 so I can’t have too many words about this one – it doesn’t heat up and does the stuff I need it to do.

Last, hdtach (ran in compatibility mode) results:

PS: Operating system: Windows 7 Home Premium, 64 bit.

One drawback I’ve noted so far: The Caps Lock key doesn’t turn on any light indicator.

I thought J2EE programming is a mess….

I’ve been programming J2EE software for many years now. However, I came a long way. From assembly programming (I’ve programmed a small boot-able code, from floppy, with a command prompt – back in the years), but just then my mom was kind enough to buy me a K6-2 266Mhz processor and upgrade the 386 AMD on which I was working on. Eheh.

As years went by, I passed to Perl, Java, PHP, etc .. , *nix administration, j2me, JNI, eeetc and now – I’m working only on J2EE, only here and there maintaining some forums / blogs in PHP.

What I dislike about J2EE is that just a simple form on web needs >20Mb of jars and libraries just to get it going. This seems a huge amount of code (zipped!) just there – as compare to, you know, 48kb games on Z80 that were keeping you hours in front of the TV.

But I just realized in fact the beauty of it. How ?

I am experienced in interacting with legacy databases, Oracle / Informix. I know how to tackle complex systems (or at least I believe I know – but as “Tao of programming” puts it, only Tao is perfect). So I am pretty much drawn on investigating alternatives to monster DBs, and lately I’ve been trying to investigate NoSQL movement. I said that maybe if I can convert and existing open source application (using MySQL / Postgres) to NoSQL (I’ve chose Redis – seemed the most friendlier to me), in the past few days I investigated what source code to modify.

So far I checked SMF (Simplemachines’s php forum), Wordpress (php blogger) and JForum (j2ee forum). What I found disturbing is that the code is littered with SQL code. Everywhere SQL code! Search the code for “select *” and tens of files contain it!

Not to mention that is seems impossible to work with two data sources at the same time (I planned to move only small bits to NoSQL and, as i was building up intuition, to move on the bigger tables, like the posts table or the users table).

It is disappointing … compared to the monster applications based on J2EE, with legacy databases, huge set of business rules and so on … wow, those applications have one thing in common. No matter how many SQLs you want to have, it’s everything into one place. ONE place. Only a couple of files contain everything that is needed… I need to change a query, I go into the mapping files and I do it. As simple as that.

So ibatis (for legacy databases) and ibator are a powerful combination.

I think I will continue to study NoSQL for these open source projects, even if I will end up with a mess of code. It seems to be messy anyway.