If twitching the widget implies the flipflops are tumbled, and if the 
flipflops are not tumbled or the spike is dendled, then twitching the 
widget implies the spike is dendled. 
        -- Keith Hanna 
%
It will sometimes be necessary for a pair to consist of three people. 
        -- Ian Utting 
%
Who here does a backup less than once a day? You're all going to die!
You see, sometimes the Disk Fairy comes around...
        -- Ian Utting
%
I suspect that most of you have used Microsoft Windows. That's why we
use it. Not because we like it. Not because it's good.
        -- Ian Utting
%
Artists are more used to drawing with things like pens than with
mice. Maybe Damien Hirst has found a way of being artistic with mice
that I haven't heard of...
        -- Peter Kenny
%
It's good exercise for your wrists all this flicking back and forth.
        -- Peter Kenny
%
What people mean when they say "Legacy Applications" is "Stuff That Works."
        -- David Chappell in an open lecture at UKC on MS .NET
%
Precision really means accuracy, and that is precisely what it means.
        -- Adrian Rawlins
%
This picture should be familiar to anyone who's been abducted by
aliens recently. It's a picture of the planet we're on. Or most of us,
anyway. I can't vouch for Jonathan Roberts.
        -- Peter Kenny
%
Methods that return a boolean should have a verb in the name, so
deadGoat returns a Goat, goatIsDead returns a boolean.
        -- Ian Utting
%
The biggest value you can store in an int is what, eight billion?
Four billion? ... What's a few hundred thousand million between
friends?
        -- Ian Utting
%
It's still state-of-the-art, you know, despite the fact that it's
obsolete.
        -- Duncan Langford
%
Do any of you fly on Airbus A320s or A340s? No? Good. I suggest you
keep it that way. They're fly-by-wire.
        -- Ian Utting, talking about encapsulation
%
That's not quote quote, it's double quote. That's quote, not backquote
which moves around all over the keyboard. Let's see if I can find it...
<starts looking behind desk>
        -- Ian Utting
%
2.0/1.0 isn't equal to 1.0. <bemused silence> I mean 2.0.
        -- Ian Utting
%
"Shouldn't that be 'x + y + z' rather than 'x + y + x'?"
"Oh, bugger. I'll fix that."
[ten minutes later]
"Shouldn't that be 'x >= z', not 'x >= y'?"
"Bloody hell. I'm not having a good day."
        -- random CO310 student and Simon Thompson in a lecture
%
In binary you've only got zero and one. It's like the frogs, you know,
in that Terry Pratchett book.
        -- Ian Utting
%
There's a language called APL where you can just roll your head around
on the keyboard and the compiler will say "Yeah, that's fine".
        -- Ian Utting talking about Java syntax
%
The world is like this. Error messages are usually crap.
        -- Simon Thompson
%
Well, you can fix this function the orange way <writes with orange pen>,
or you can fix it the purple way <writes with purple pen>.
        -- Simon Thompson
%
All the porter can understand is the concept of "first pigeon hole"
and nothing else.
        -- Aliy Fowler
%
Prolog is like smoking cannabis; you can't remember anything for more
than three seconds.
        -- Aliy Fowler
%
Memos exist to protect the sender.
        -- Ian Utting (quoted in a sig on Usenet in March '99)
%
Learn to love your geeky nature.
        -- Ian Utting
%
You can have as many return statements in a method as you like.
And the functional programmers will whinge at you.
        -- Ian Utting
%
If you don't understand what PATH is for or how it works, you should BACK
AWAY FROM THAT KEYBOARD NOW SIR. KEEP YOUR HANDS AWAY FROM THE MOUSE.
        -- Ian Utting in ukc.cs.cs3
%
This slide is on storage technology, but you may be forgiven for
thinking it's on data compression, as I've used a very small font.
        -- Peter Kenny in a lecture on Storage Technologies and 
           Data Compression
%
Have the concepts of redundancy and entropy been introduced in the
cryptography lectures? <silence> 

I'm getting a lot of "I've been to the lectures but I'm not quite
sure what was happening" looks here.
        -- Peter Kenny
%
Let's say you have an essay on banana growing in South Wales...
        -- Peter Kenny
%
I can see somebody writing that down. This is now going to get on the
newsgroups and I'm going to be in trouble.
        -- Peter Kenny
%
Look up in the Microsoft dictionary the word "compression" and it may
not mean reduction in size but the reverse.
        -- Peter Kenny
%
However, the skier featured in this picture unfortunately had an
affair with the editor's wife and therefore must be edited out.
        -- Aliy Fowler, struggling to find a decent excuse for 
           a Photoshop assessment
%
At some point, try getting a Microsoft salesman to say "Java". They
can't manage it.
	-- Ian Utting
%
What's data? Well, how many people here are wearing white underpants?
	-- Jonathan Roberts
%
Have you seen the latest Jurassic Park film? There's this big battle
scene where all the robots are coming through this imaginary shield...
	-- Jonathan Roberts, who meant Star Wars, we assume
%
X is weird if X is vegetarian and eats steak, or if X is a trainspotter.
	-- Aliy Fowler
%
Then we have the Tab predicate which is fairly obvious what it does. 
The thing is, it doesn't work like a normal tab predicate which is 
why I bring it up.
	-- Aliy Fowler
%
So this is a pants implementation of the Tab predicate, really.
	-- Aliy Fowler on PROLOG's Tab predicate
%
So you ask PROLOG "Who's a weirdo?" and it comes back and says "Tony 
and Dave", which can be quite useful...
	-- Aliy Fowler
%
... and if you decide Volvo isn't really a car...
	-- Aliy Fowler
%
What PROLOG is thinking is that you're just some nonce who knows 
nothing about fruit and vegetables and so it's not going to let you 
touch them.
	-- Aliy Fowler
%
Like all operating system programmers, they couldn't resist the 
temptation to add on extra "features".
	-- Gerald Tripp on Chorus MIX
%
Window managers - not quite sure what you'd use one of them for...
	-- Gerald Tripp
%
You can use [Chorus MIX] to run a process on someone else's 
workstation instead, so yours runs faster. It's very open like that.
	-- Gerald Tripp
%
You can use this to do things like send a message to the filesystem 
to say "hello". It'll probably ignore you, though.
	-- Gerald Tripp
%
... in the course of this duration...
	-- Peter Kenny
%
However, in every garden there is a snake.
	-- Peter Kenny
%
Any questions about MMX and the snake in the garden?
	-- Peter Kenny
%
...Which I keep calling Screaming SIMD Extension. I'm sorry, I can't 
help it, it keeps coming to me.
	-- Peter Kenny
%
I guess they like the number 8... Maybe they've only got 8 fingers, 
the programmers there [Intel and AMD], and their thumbs... let's not go 
there.
	-- Peter Kenny
%
There are some things in Object Oriented Programming it is best not to
think about. The fact that all these things are objects is one of them.
	-- Phil Watson
%
Suppose a new employee started; he might only have security clearance for
the canteen menu, for instance.
	-- Gerald Tripp, talking about military security
%
What are your competitors? What are their ideas? As much as you can,
nick their ideas.
	-- Aliy Fowler
%
That's because Word's justification algorithm is basically pants.
	-- Sally Fincher
%
So it's similar to a "const" statement in C or a---somebody tell me 
what it is---final static void only-on-alternate-Tuesdays attribute 
in Java.
	-- Tim Hopkins
%
It is in the committee members' interest to slow down the 
standardisation process as much as possible, so they can get lots of 
free skiing.
	-- Tim Hopkins
%
Methods might look very much like procedures and those things you put 
in the brackets might look uncannily like variables; but they're not, 
they're *messages*.
	-- Tim Hopkins on how much he despises Java
%
Whether those features [in Fortran 90] that allow you to do your 
array operations in parallel, whether those features will ever be 
used in anger, I don't know.
	-- Tim Hopkins
%
[Fortran 2000] is going to have Objects in it. Why? Because everybody 
else's language has Objects in it. It's going to have interactive UML 
in it too.
	-- Tim Hopkins exasperated about them fixing something 
           that ain't broke
%
Honestly, it's like one of those fractal diagrams you get, you can't 
make head or tail of it.
	-- Tim Hopkins on UML
%
You might have gathered I'm not a fan of Object Oriented babble.
	-- Tim "I was doing all these fancy things in 1963" Hopkins
%
They won't let me teach the Java course. I'd probably have them all 
coding in Perl by now.
	-- Tim Hopkins
%
Programmes that stop dead are generally not very useful, especially 
if you're landing on the moon.
	-- Tim Hopkins
%
We find that the students who fail are usually the ones who have not
attended the lectures.
	-- Len Little
%
It's not an exam, because the university has rules about exams.
It's a coursework which is _exactly_ like an exam.
	-- Ian Utting
%
Are there any BASIC programmers here? I haven't used BASIC since
1975.
	-- Ian Utting
%
Oh, and i is the square root of minus one in maths, which makes
it a bugger to count with.
	-- Ian Utting, talking about loop variables
%
I came across the expression "syntactic strychnine" the other day, which 
I thought was rather hmmmmm...
	-- Andrew Runnalls
%
This is ChattyInt number 1, reporting!
[...]
ChattyInt #5 bites the dust
	-- Andrew Runnalls, in sample code
%
Oh, I think the compiler has here elided one of the things it might 
have done.
	-- Andrew Runnalls
%
Now, actually, if you compile it with the GNU C++ compiler it actually 
works, so I've compiled it with Kai C++ with optimisation just to show 
why it's wrong.
	-- Andrew Runnalls
%
This loop here is a word in Java---it's "step-through-all-the-elements-of-
an-array-and-do-something". With hyphens in the middle.
	-- Ian Utting
%
Lingo likes to think it's object-oriented.
	-- Aliy Fowler
%
Bugger, they've changed this! There's supposed to be a script
button here...
	-- Aliy Fowler
%
Some of you can learn to improve your score in these exams---in any
exams---by reading the fucking question.
	-- Ian Utting, deconstructing an exam
%
A "while" runs until it stops, and then it stops. Some of you thought
it stopped then it started again.
	-- Ian Utting, deconstructing an exam
%
In the absence of "phone a friend", most people went for "50-50". It
was hard not to get at least one mark here.
	-- Ian Utting, deconstructing an exam
%
The thing to do when using mod 17 arithmetic is imagine you're wearing
blurry spectacles, where instead of 32 you see 15 and instead of -2 you see
15.
	-- Chris Woodcock
%
I don't know why it's called a "dope vector", except that possibly the
person who invented it was stoned when he did it.
	-- Tim Hopkins
%
When I write Java it works, but if I show it to David Barnes, he
giggles. No, it's not OO - the Airbus A320 still flies. Sometimes.
	-- Tim Hopkins
%
So, we have "class Puzzle15" followed by "public". Oh. Sorry, Freudian
slip there.
	-- Andrew Runnals adding an "l" to the visibility modifier he's
	   just written on the board
%
STL stands for "I'll never have to write a linked list again!"
	-- Andrew Runnals
%
mary and the dog were boistrous
jim and cathy and the dog were ready and waiting
	-- Aliy Fowler, in lecture notes for a natural language parser
%
We could have mary and the dog and fred and the janitor all together,
that's fine.
	-- Aliy Fowler
%
Because it's generated by a committee, it also generates an arbitrary 
nonce just to be on the safe side.
	-- Peter Linington on X.500
%
I don't believe in commenting.
	-- Ian Utting
%
2 and 5 are objects, as opposed to Java, where they are primitive thingies.
	-- Stefan Kahrs
%
You spend hours putting in all your symptoms and the system comes back and just
says "You've got malaria". 
	-- Aliy Fowler
%
tarquin was in a dress and in some stilettos
	-- Aliy Fowler, in lecture notes for a natural language parser
%
This has probably already happened to you. At parties, never admit
that you're a computer scientist, because people will come up to you
and say "Oh, I'm using Microsoft Word and I can't get it to insert
a box in the margin." [...] This is what one of my colleagues calls the
"You're a musician, come and help me shift this piano" approach.
	-- Ian Utting
%
If you listen to cockpit voice recorders from fly-by-wire aircraft
that are about to crash, then what you tend to hear is the same sort
of things that people say to their PCs. "How do you stop it doing that?
What did we do last time it did that?"
	-- Ian Utting
%
If you've got a really long surname, then it'll push your "Credit Rating"
field into the "Debit Rating" field, and then the Inland Revenue will come
and firebomb your house.
	-- Ian Utting
%
You and the compiler can get along, providing you do exactly what it wants you
to.
	-- Ian Utting
%
And the flip-flops may go half flippy and half floppy. 
	-- Keith Hanna, talking about cracking smart cards
%
This is a bit off-topic, but I'm going to talk about it anyway
since it leads into a nice bit of Microsoft-bashing later.
	-- Bob Eager
%
I'm an object; just stuff something into me.
	-- Stefan Kahrs
%
Express your ideas in any form you like: an essay, a webpage, a graphic, an
interpretive dance. Whatever.
	-- Ian Utting
%
I've successfully explained programs to cats. Although you have to train
them properly, 'cos they're buggers for running away in the middle of an
explanation.
	-- Ian Utting, talking about debugging
%
"Java is a completely incomprehensible language."
"Well, if you compare it to APL or ADA..."
	-- James Stormont and Ian Utting in a Java lecture
%
My apologies also for not being perfect in every respect -- I only hope
this is as far as your experience of "unacceptable" life experiences
goes. I somehow think, however, that you may be in for a shock soon.
	-- Tim Hopkins on ukc.cs.cs3
%
> Can anyone tell me what sort of results I should expect for my Fortran
> work? 
 
Correct ones. 
	-- Tim Hopkins on ukc.cs.cs3
%
Due to underwhelming demand, the lecture at 4:00 tomorrow
(Friday) has been cancelled.
	-- D.C.Wood on ukc.cs.cs3
%
Right, let's do this the right way round. Put the *transparent* one on
the overhead projector, and cover it with the *opaque* one.
	-- Andrew Runnals
%
Friends! Nothing to do with Phoebe and supporting cast...
	-- Andrew Runnals
%
It doesn't mean the vending machine commits suicide, it means the
world comes to a halt.
	-- Stefan Kahrs
%
This doesn't happen nearly often enough, so whatever nonsense you write
you can get away with. Don't tell my colleagues I said that.
	-- Eerke Boiten on Formal Development, his research area
%
qu1 = "Women are the best programmers"
ans1 = true
	-- Example slides provided by Aliy Fowler
%
If you have a number... if you have a pen that works, _and_ a number...
	-- Ian Utting
%
I have a friend who has a problem. Every time he tries to compile, the computer
starts taking it, but then suddenly gives an error saying about not being
ready, or it not being the right time. He thinks the computer is just being
tight, what can I do to help? 
	-- Anonymous on the CO309 Anonymous Questions page
%
There's a lot of bandwidth wasted when Luke Skywalker's having boring
conversations.
	-- David Shrimpton, on bandwidth and throughput for video
%
You don't normally in the real world expect a flower to fall over and a
house appear in it's place.
	-- David Shrimpton, on synthetic relationships of media objects
%
It's no good having a 2 hour film, followed by the 2 hour soundtrack,
because apart from it taking 4 hours, you have to have a good memory.
	-- David Shrimpton, on relationships between media objects
%
I obviously haven't read all of this, as I don't understand this slide.
	-- Ian Utting, cup of coffee in hand, during a CO309 lecture
%
Following a course is not just about sleeping through the lectures 
then reviewing the slides/handouts.
[...] 
Ian. 
(Not meaning to imply that you sleep through the lectures.) 
	-- Ian Utting on ukc.cs.cs1
%
> So if IAU is reading this whats the plan? 
 
Am I supposed to have a plan? 
	-- Ian Utting on ukc.cs.cs1
%
If I send my daughter into the garden to get my beer, I don't want her to
return and say that she found the beer. I want her to return *the beer*.
	-- John Crawford
%
What's it like? Is it like Fortran?
	-- Nigel Dalgliesh on Visual Basic
%
Perle?[sic] was originally good at strings but not as good as Perle.
	-- Lecture slides by Nigel Dalgliesh
%
Here's a trivial, typical computing science department exercise which
is completely fatuous.
	-- Nigel Dalgliesh
%
And I've lost my one stick of chalk which I managed to find somewhere
in the computing lab..
	-- David Shrimpton bemoaning supply difficulties
%
[Operating systems] are small programs. They're difficult to write,
even in Java.
	-- David Shrimpton
%
It's my policy on this course not to mention Microsoft as too many
people slag it off. Microsoft actually produce some quite good
systems.

Sometimes.
	-- David Shrimpton
%
You know, the sort of thing you do when Top of the Pops is on---put on some
headphones with some decent music and do some work.
	-- Tim Hopkins
%
You can always tell when the Teaching Quality people are around
because the porters come out in force with their Securicor guards and
deposit a stick of chalk in each lecture theatre. So when you see a
Securicor van, it's nothing to do with the banks, it's a chalk
delivery.
	-- Tim Hopkins bemoaning the lack of supplies
%
"This formula would seem to lead to a reasonably easy way to multiply
eight digit numbers in one's head" - Don Knuth

"Speak for yourself!" - Tim Hopkins
	-- Lecture slides
%
This is the sort of comment you can make when you have a brain the
size of a planet and all us plebs are just plodding along behind.
	-- Tim Hopkins, slagging off Don Knuth
%
I've got to toss a coin. It's a hundred-sided coin.
	-- Peter Welch
%
Where are we going? Oh well, let's go on a mystery tour.
	-- Ian Utting, encountering a slide he hadn't seen before
%
The alternative to a spot of hacking for the assessment is a written 
one. We don't want to go there do we? 

Anyone who cannot finish the exercise because VB won't let them should 
let me know ASAP. 
	-- Nigel Dalgliesh on ukc.cs.cs3
%
>I wan't my CO309 Assessment 5 marks. I worked long and hard for these  
>and I have yet to recieve them. PLEASE TELL ME WHY!!!!! 
 
Because you didn't submit anything. 
	-- jc26 and Ian Utting on ukc.cs.cs1
%
>Pardon my ignorance, but why exactly are we learning E-Lotos and what is it 
>good for, also what has it got to do with Distributed Systems? 
 
Fahad, 
 
I'll only pardon your ignorance if you came to my first CO610 lecture, 
listened attentively, and now still remember everything I said there ;) 
	-- fzm1 and Eerke Boiten on ukc.cs.cs3
%
And then you can have a class called Object which is an object of class Class.
<bemused looks> I can't do uppercase and Courier font when I'm speaking. I try,
but I can't get the serifs right.
	-- Ian Utting
%
Then we can use this constraint here...  Oh, bummer, the hash has dropped off.
	-- Andy King in a Constraint Logic Programming lecture
%
If the ATC system was as reliable as MS Word 2000, then I would be walking to
North Carolina next week.
	-- Ian Utting
%
The waterfall model doesn't work. It's simple enough for managers to
understand; that's why it's popular.
	-- Ian Utting
%
You can go out and buy a commercial CRC-cards package for Windows. It'll cost
about $900 a seat and all it will do is put 3"x5" index cards on your screen.
The reason 3"x5" index cards are better is because they are about £1.40 a pack.
They implement a virtual desktop, which is normally called the floor, they
provide tactile feedback, and they support multiple pointing devices.  Backup
is a real problem---that's where the program comes in handy---but that's what a
digital camera is for. Unless Dyson make a scanner.
	-- Ian Utting
%
Yes, although of course you are all gifted insightful highly motivated
individuals [Chorus: WE ARE ALL ALL GIFTED INSIGHTFUL HIGHLY MOTIVATED
INDIVIDUALS], students who are doing their final year after having come
back from a year in industry do tend to have extra motivation and
dedication, and a wider view of the subject. 
	-- Eerke Boiten on ukc.cs.cs1
%
Smart reuse is great. Just as long as you don't reuse your friends' solutions
;)
	-- Eerke Boiten on the CO312 Anonymous Questions page
%
Q: Is being sarcastic a big part of teaching Co312?
A: I'm not sure. I've checked the answers here for sarcasm, and only answer 2
   contains some.
	-- Anonymous and Eerke Boiten on the CO312 Anonymous Questions page
%
The only thing that I can add is that people did not complain that it
was seriously time consuming last year and I have no reason to believe that
they were any cleverer than you.
	-- Ursula Fuller on ukc.cs.cs3
%
I'm tempted to be a luddite and suggest that this is printed out and stuck up
on a noticeboard somewhere, on the grounds that people have had some prior
experience in noticeboard usage.
	-- Colin Johnson
%
Who do you think the hardest Computer Science lecturer is?
We reckon Nigel Dalgliesh.
	-- rpe1 on ukc.cs.cs1

>I reckon that Bob Eager is harder than Dalgliesh!

Not a chance - you seen the pic of dalgliesh on the website?  Damn scary.
Tho sally fincher probably comes a close second ;)
	-- sv1 and bcc3 on ukc.cs.cs1

We should organise a Royal Rumble of CS lecturers.  Thinking about it, Eerke
Boiten would probably be the last man in with Dalgliesh scrapping it out.  He's
pretty damn hard too.
	-- rpe1 on ukc.cs.cs1

Mander is not only the head of computing but also leader of the Imperial
Empire.
	-- krnm1 on ukc.cs.cs1
%
Just got my CO312 Java back... 
You can imagine my horror when I looked at my print out to see I had  left 
all the swear word variables and System.outs in the final code. 
 
System.out.println("There are " + col + " motherf***ing columns"); 
System.out.println("There are " + row + " motherf***ing rows"); 
and public void slag(bla bla bla); 
oh crap 
	-- rpe1 on ukc.cs.cs1
%
Subject: Re: co606 - poor marking.
On mine she said she couldn't try it because I didn't give the password.
Good password policy dictates you shouldn't ever tell ANYONE.
	-- tdb1 on ukc.cs.cs3
%
We do not make sample answers available, because:
* Reading an answer is not the same as writing one. Writing is what you
are trying to do, not reading. If it was the same, all the questions in
the exam would be of the form "is the sample answer above like the one
you would have written" :-)
	-- Ian Utting on the CO309 Anonymous Questions page
%