Just thought I'd post 'cause I've got fed up of seeing Blair at the top of my blog!
I suppose there's quite a lot I could have blogged about (and at the time thought "ooooh, that's something to blog about), but when push came to shove couldn't be arsed pressing the keys to make it happen!
I've started demonstrating Java again. This year it's going to be a bit of a ball ache... as they've upgraded from NetBeans 3.6 to NetBeans 4... yeah, I know NetBeans 5 is out now, but just don't go there!
A quick gander at the NetBeans IDE 4.1 Release Notes reveals that the minimum requirements are...
Microsoft Windows operating systems:
Processor: 500 MHz Intel Pentium III workstation or equivalent
Memory: 384 megabytes
Disk space: 125 megabytes of free disk space
So, it's a bit of a pity that they're running it on machines with only 128Mb of RAM - the accessing of the virtual memory on the harddrive makes it virtually impossible to use! As demonstrators we've decided to start telling people that if they want to bring in a laptop they can do it on that.
I hope that the people will all moan in a way that only self-rightous undergraduate bastards can do in the lecture... and hopefully it won't land of deaf ears... and something will be done about it!
What annoys me is that it's me who gets stick for the computers running slowly... especially from this one guy who shouted at me "Is it meant to be this slow"... What sort of a stupid question is that? Clearly, it's 'meant' to be that slow... because Sun know that all Java programmers are masochists and like to wait 10 seconds between each keypress.
Obviously, what he meant to ask was "Is this running slowly on my machine, or is it the same all the others?"... he then began to wind me up by getting frustrated and violent with the mouse, keyboard and monitor... the three things which weren't at fault!
When it came to compile the simple task (which takes 5 minutes 30 seconds on average) he started getting frustrated again... and instead of leaving the computer alone, he kept resizing the windows and messing about... with it taking about 30 seconds a time to redraw... what an idiot... the computer has enough issues redrawing the screen when it's dormant and it's just updating a letter after pressing a key... moving the windows around and forcing the computer to redraw the whole screen all the time, whilst it's compiling isn't going to make it a happy bunny. Grrrrrr... another guy for Ed's 'Dickhead' bin I feel.