It’s late so this post won’t be anywhere near eloquent but, put simply, I must’ve ticked some of the right boxes during the interview because this morning I got my acceptance letter from Durham university, much to my relief! It really is a lovely place, take a look at their video here: http://www.dur.ac.uk/tour/
What’s more, it’s fully catered so I won’t need to learn how to cook. Well, not just yet anyway. I’ll be leaving in October to go up there but my job ends in July so I ought really to plan a trip or two for those couple of months in between. Hmm…what to do…?
Monthly Archive for February, 2008
This week I travelled up to Durham for my university interview. It really is an impressive place - both the city and the college itself. Happily, I managed to catch the best of the weather in Durham, bitterly cold but clear-skied and sunny - a welcome change from the monotony of 150 miles of fog on the journey up there. The university itself is made up of 16 colleges in total, with departments scattered around the city. I’ve applied to study software engineering at Hild Bede, which is pictured on the left.
The interview was actually fairly unremarkable, save for one thing. Puzzles. If any of the other applicants knew that we would be given puzzles to solve, they kept quiet. After the initial look of horror on my face had faded, I had a look at the question and it went something like this:
A car salesman has 4 customers come in one day.
To the first customer he sells half his cars and 1 additional car.
To the second customer he sells half of the remaining cars and 1 additional car.
The third customer also buys half the remaining cars and 1 additional car.
Finally, the fourth customer buys half the remaining cars and 1 additional car.
The salesman now has 0 cars left, how many did he start with?
Now I did manage to find the correct answer after a couple of minutes but the difficult part was that I was asked to explain my thought process throughout - even the most minor thought that crossed my mind was important to them. The answer, I was told, wasn’t important. As I later realised, what better way to learn how someone thinks than to ask them to repeat every thought out loud? That being the case, you could be a complete failure and still succeed provided you explain how you failed!
As a programmer working as part of a team one of the most important skills is the ability to explain how your code works to someone in a clear manner that they can follow. Puzzles like these are a great test of that skill. Answers on a comment, please!
When KDE 4 was released, I rushed to grab the brand new packages like a kid on Christmas day. Now, a few weeks on, I can share some of the problems that I encountered that would pose a real problem for the average user. All these are based on the latest 4.0.1 release on Ubuntu Gusty.
1. Stability, Stability, Stability
It’s a given that any project with the size and complexity of KDE 4 is going to have bugs in the first release - what surprised me was the number of ’showstopper’ bugs even in 4.0.1. It was rushed out of the door and what’s worse is that it shows. Some of the many problems that I ran into were Plasma crashes, file association issues, disappearing desktop icons and the inability to use kdesu. Granted, the last one was solved with a quick Google but your average user is going to find it more of a problem. On the bright side, the KDE developers are doubtless hard at work polishing applications and frameworks and ironing out bugs as I write this. Given a few releases, KDE 4 should have become a fairly stable desktop but as it stands it’s a nightmare to use for day-to-day tasks.
2. That enormous taskbar!
I’m something of a minimalist at heart and the first thing I do when setting up Gnome is to shrink the taskbar to its minimum 25 pixel size. Why this essential option never made it into KDE 4 is beyond me. At least it looks as if the OpenSUSE team have added a re-sizable taskbar for the second alpha of OpenSUSE 11. With any luck this feature will be included in an official release sooner rather than later.
3. Zombie Konqueror
I love Dolphin. It’s what KDE’s file manager should have been like for a long time - simple, usable, yet still configurable enough for more technical users. The problem is that I can’t get enough of Dolphin, literally. In many places, Konqueror still rears its ugly head as the default file manager. I see this when opening local links from other applications and from certain shortcuts in the applications menu. Whether this is a problem with the Ubuntu packages or KDE itself, I’m not sure but the user should never have to deal with two competing file managers. If one of the aims of KDE 4 was to pare down Konqueror to become a light and nimble web browser, the local file management ought to have been removed completely.
4. Login issues
Even more worrying is the trouble that KDE has just starting up. About 20% of the time I was greeted to either a totally black screen or a semi-functional desktop with no keyboard response. Sometimes I was lucky enough to be able to partially interact with the menus through the blackness! Curiously, this problem seemed to happen more often when using KDM 4 instead of GDM.
5. No NetworkManager functionality
With a fresh KDE 4 install there’s no graphical interface to NetworkManager at all. I can’t begin to stress how vital it is to have out-of-the-box networking as this has always been one area where Linux has consistently lagged behind the Windows and Mac platforms. Your options are to install either the Gnome applet (and all the associated Gnome libraries) or install KNetworkManager (and all the KDE 3.x libraries). I understand that a KDE 4 port of NetworkManager using Solid is underway. I like the idea of Solid as a platform for hardware configuration and integrating NetworkManager into it can only be a good thing. I just wish it’d been ready to go on day one.
I get the feeling that starting a blog is much the same as staring at a blank canvas. That is to say, you, the artist, have a fairly solid idea of the picture you want to realise - be it raw page views, insightful comments or that warm, fuzzy feeling that someone out there gives a damn about what you write. None of that comes without applying some paint, paying attention to the smallest brush strokes while still seeing the bigger picture.
What I want to create is something that you might find interesting, amusing, useful or helpful. At the same time, it’s a chance for me to refine my writing skills and create something I can look back at and reflect on. Hosting fees are also a good reason for making good use of a blog, though not my primary drive, of course! 
I reckon I’ve pushed the canvas metaphor far enough for one evening. It’s time I went and threw some paint around…
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