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Showing posts from April, 2010

Should I Get a Graduate Degree in Software Engineering?

I recently decided to go back to school to get a degree in software engineering from the University Of Texas at Austin attending the executive format offered by the engineering department. Is it worth it? What is it like? You can read more on the UT website, but below I will give you my personal perspective, the answers to the questions I had when deciding whether to pursue the degree. First question: Are the topics covered relevant?   I am a consultant software developer working for Catapult Systems working on enterprise software development. Am I going to learn things which I can apply? I don’t want academic fluff. I am a working professional and need real application. I am currently in my first semester and so far the material has been very interesting and I have been able to apply much of the material learned to my current projects at work. I’ve even integrated some of the code written for projects into projects at work. Below is a list of the courses offered. Here is a course l

SSD Performance Test

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I’ve been running an SSD as my primary drive for a few weeks now and it performs quite well. Outlook doesn’t hang, and Visual Studio build times are cut way down. Boot up and shut down are much better. Total cost: $260 + $50 = 310. Using winsat tool: Patriot Torqx SSD 64 GB, as primary drive in laptop Sequential read: 116 MB/s (3 x faster) Random read: 39 MB/s (35 x faster) Sequential write: 90 MB/s (2.5 x faster) 7200 RPM 100 GB in expansion slot : Sequential read: 40 MB/s Random read: 1.11 MB/s Sequential write: 34.7 MB/s