QUOTES-CS-00 was last updated at Thu Aug 26 21:58:39 2004.
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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 UttingI 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 UttingArtists 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 KennyIt's good exercise for your wrists all this flicking back and forth.
-- Peter KennyWhat people mean when they say "Legacy Applications" is "Stuff That Works."
-- David Chappell in an open lecture at UKC on MS .NETPrecision really means accuracy, and that is precisely what it means.
-- Adrian RawlinsThis 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 KennyMethods that return a boolean should have a verb in the name, so
deadGoat returns a Goat, goatIsDead returns a boolean.
-- Ian UttingThe biggest value you can store in an int is what, eight billion?
Four billion? ... What's a few hundred thousand million between
friends?
-- Ian UttingIt's still state-of-the-art, you know, despite the fact that it's
obsolete.
-- Duncan LangfordDo 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 encapsulationThat'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 Utting2.0/1.0 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 lectureIn binary you've only got zero and one. It's like the frogs, you know,
in that Terry Pratchett book.
-- Ian UttingThere'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 syntaxThe world is like this. Error messages are usually crap.
-- Simon ThompsonWell, 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 ThompsonAll the porter can understand is the concept of "first pigeon hole"
and nothing else.
-- Aliy FowlerProlog is like smoking cannabis; you can't remember anything for more
than three seconds.
-- Aliy FowlerMemos exist to protect the sender.
-- Ian Utting (quoted in a sig on Usenet in March '99)Learn to love your geeky nature.
-- Ian UttingYou can have as many return statements in a method as you like.
And the functional programmers will whinge at you.
-- Ian UttingIf 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.cs3This 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 CompressionHave 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 KennyLet's say you have an essay on banana growing in South Wales...
-- Peter KennyI can see somebody writing that down. This is now going to get on the
newsgroups and I'm going to be in trouble.
-- Peter KennyLook up in the Microsoft dictionary the word "compression" and it may
not mean reduction in size but the reverse.
-- Peter KennyHowever, 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 assessmentAt some point, try getting a Microsoft salesman to say "Java". They can't manage it.
Ian Utting
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
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
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
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
...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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
Submissions and corrections to Adam Sampson <quotes@offog.org>