Last night I installed the ICQ instant messenger and was thoroughly disgusted by what appeared to be a monstrosity of a user interface. Remembering that there was interoperability between AIM and ICQ, I decided today to download AIM and give that a shot.

Here is what I saw (Clicky for a larger version):

And I was shocked. The AIM of today is a far cry from the AIM of last year. This new client sports a custom skin; usually this is a bad thing, but I think they may actually have come up with one of the better examples of non-standard interfaces.

What was really shocking was that the client came with something called AIM Explorer — a web browser of all things. The first time I noticed it was when I attempted to recover my password, and I just stopped and stared for a few minutes.

It actually looked pretty okay, but after a few minutes of usage, I realised — this is what the Internet Explorer team is trying to do and failing misreably at. I mean, its subtly animated, got little glow effects, its blueish (duh), its got Firefox style tabs, and interestingly enough, it’s got anti-spyware/adware detectors for common stuff. Oh, and a working feed reader (Clicky for a larger version):

Lets not forget the thumbnails that appear when you move your pointer over a tab… Yes folks you read that right. Thumbnails. That work. That don’t slow you down. That aren’t ridiculously useless. Shocking.

Did I mention it’s based on Internet Explorer? Yeah, that part sort of got me off-guard too. The first browser to come out of AOL/Netscape not to suck, and its IE based, and beats the living daylight out of what the IE Team is pushing.

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…