Davyd Madeley gives us a pre-release tour of GNOME 2.12. Very nice stuff indeed. Definitely a polish release.

“Open up Internet Explorer, go to Tools->Internet Options and clear all cookies, downloaded programme files and the history please. Alright. Now, please disconnect from the internet, turn off your modem for 15 minutes, and reconnect. If you still experience problems, call us back.”

“But… I’m on DSL/512. I shouldn’t be getting these low speeds no matter what.”

“Yes sir. Please turn your modem off for 15 minutes and call us back. Now, is there anything else I can help you with?”

What was my original complaint? I called up and explained that for the past month I’ve been having frequent disconnections, and reduced bandwidth to the point where dialup looks good. I’ve run their craptacular tests for bandwidth, and scored a consistent 142 kbit/s. I ran it three times as the page requested, took the average, and … what do they do? Tell me to delete my cookies.

Larger version

After five years of work, I’m glad they’ve improved the Application not responding dialog. Now, if they can just stop Windows Explorer from not responding…

Well, I was informed that I once again have the pleasure of redesigning the GNOME Journal a second time. Thankfully, this time there isn’t a time limit of, We’re going live as soon as the design is done, k? As fun as that was, its nice to have had some time to think it over properly, and I’ve decided to do several things differently this time:

• I’m going to keep the current article formatting style, but with enhancements — GNOME is all about usability etc., and having a full screen of text isn’t all that usable. Elastically sized article div, welcome.
• Smoother look — I was looking at Download.com the other day, and what really stood out was how smoooooooth the site looked. Definitely not a bad thing.
• More… help, more community — as it stands now, there’s no direct linkage to GNOME, or the GNOME community, and I’d like to bring that out a little more this time. In my original mockups, there was a highlights splash of sorts, drawing attention directly to it, showing of the best parts of the journal. Maybe some smaller highlights this time, and in a visual fashion as well.

Mockups later today.

Judge me by my size, do you? And well you should not – for my ally is the Force. And a powerful ally it is. Life greets it, makes it grow. Its energy surrounds us, and binds us. Luminescent beings are we, not this crude matter! You must feel the Force around you, everywhere.

Meeeeeeh.

I have a Java assignment to pass up tomorrow. The class has to do with the basics, like data structures, and references. Now, the question is based entirely around a linked list, which you’re expected to build from scratch.

One problem though — the question cannot be solved by any means I know. Lets go through it together. First, you need to create a class called Student. This class contains information like the student’s name, id and so forth. Next, create a class called StudentNode, which contains an instance of Student called data, and another called nextStudent. data will contain the actual student information, and nextStudent will function as a pointer of sorts, thereby allowing advancement to the next item in the list.

Or will it? If nextStudent points at the next Student and Student doesn’t contain any reference to the next item in the list… how does one advance beyond the first item in the list? I don’t know. Do you?

Update: Just realised something. If I interpret their incredibly phrased document in just the right way, I can include a StudentNode instead of a Student in the StudentNode class…