New netbook...kind of

Last night hanging out with Andrew I decided to pick up a new netbook/ultrabook. I really don't know which it really is in all honesty. It is the Acer Aspire One, and seems to fit a land between the ultra low end netbooks and the ultra expensive ultrabooks. It has a dual core Celeron processor with the Sandybridge architecture, reasonable battery life, and capability for 8 gb of ram (which obviously happened immediately). This seems like a decent travel machine for projects, in addition to the setup that I mentioned in the previous post. Obviously not everything I do can be done from a tablet, such as the arduino stuff, android programming, and working with the kinect. Oh, and this little guy supports openCL. Lots of directions to explore. So now I have two different platforms going, so I will see how this works out. I think the first order of business might be to write a python implementation of the spigot algorithm for calculating pi. I will try using cloud9 for most of this, and then probably do some initial speed tests on the laptop thing using pypy. I am really interested here if the JIT can get it to outperform a well know C implementation such as y-cruncher. Also, this looks interesting http://www.adafruit.com/blog/2012/09/19/sneak-peek-adafruit-raspberry-pi-webide/