Hello, world

Today I used a *nix GUI for the first time. A year ago or more, there was some kerfuffle about attempting to install first Red Hat 5.2, then a recent version of Mandrake, then finally FreeBSD onto my poor little laptop, which didn't take the strain too well. We did get FreeBSD on there, it's true, but the machine just couldn't cope with a GUI. At one point we tried moving the mouse. Nothing happened, except that four minutes later the cursor jumped across the screen :-)

So today I used a *nix GUI for the first time (on Red Hat, if you're wondering). And today I wrote my first ever Java program, which worked perfectly first time. This was a bit of a shock, since even the couple of sample programs that we copied out character for character came up with errors because of my typos...

I was very chuffed though since it was complicated enough that we had to look things up, and my previous Java (and programming) experience consists of reading through tutorials and maybe writing down the salient points on paper.

Yay me.