Last Chance for Free Food

If you want to come to the Finalists BBQ and get some free meat (vegetarian options will be available too) then you need to get your tickets from the departmental office before the end of tomorrow (Wednesday 23rd). The BBQ is open to all 3rd and 4th year students (1st and 2nd year students don’t need to worry as we’ll be doing something similar next year and the year after).  It is on Monday 28 May in Sanctuary from 2.30 pm to 5.30 pm.

If you prefer free pizza (or want to have both) the Microsoft Windows 8 developer camp will end with free food too. It’s on Wednesday June 6th and you can sign up here:

http://hullwindows8.eventbrite.com/

Teaching in “Sometimes Useful Shock Horror"

If any of my students ever want to bring me a completed exam script I’m always happy to “mark” it in front of them. Quite a few take advantage of this and it really helps their grades (folks on 08120 – there’s still time before Thursday)

I’ve spent some time today going through answers and I’ve noticed something that worries me every time I see it. Some of the answers were just about spot on, but didn’t leave me with the impression that the student giving them really knew what they were talking about. It was as if they were just giving responses that they had learned, rather than speaking about something they understood. Now the thing is that this approach probably works fine if you are learning about Kings and Queens of England, but it is very different when we are teaching something that we really want you to apply. A lot of the stuff that we are teaching is intended to be applied to solve problems.

The thing to remember, if you are stuck in this revision thing, is that it is much more sensible to put effort into trying to understand the topic that it is to work really hard just remembering things. I never really got to grips with the piano because I was too “lazy” to learn how to sight read music for my left hand. So I’d just learn the left hand bit in time for the lesson that week. Of course, eventually this technique broke, when I found that the next exam had a “sight reading” test.

Learning to program is like this. You can learn “If a class implements an interface it must contain implementations of all the methods specified in the interface for it to be possible to create an instance of that class”. Or you can work out that we have interfaces so that we can build systems that deal with objects in terms of what behaviours they have (these are the methods specified in the interface) rather than the class hierarchy that they are part of.

Knowing the former will get you half the marks in the exam. Knowing the latter will let you create a mechanism whereby all the objects in your solution, the receipts, customer records, addresses, invoices and product descriptions, can be sent to a printing process that just asks them to print, and doesn’t care what type of object they really are because all the objects implement the iPrint interface which contains a “PrintToPaper” method.

If you want me to go through any of this stuff please come and see me and I’ll be happy to do just that. You can also post questions on the forum, and use the Twitter tag #08120Revision for quick questions. And don’t forget that we are not telling you this stuff so you can reflect it back to us in exam answers, we are telling you this stuff so you can use it to make things work.

I always find it amusing when students come back to me after a while on the course and say “That thing you taught us, turns out it is actually useful”.

Well, duh.

Thwaite Gardens Open Day

Last year we went to Thwaite Hall gardens. And this year we went again. The weather was nowhere near as nice, but the grounds themselves were just as amazing as ever. I find it really hard to believe that this area of woodland, complete with lake, is just round the corner from where we live. I think last year’s pictures were better, but that didn’t stop me from having another go.

There are apparently some very rare trees here, but to me they all just look lovely.

One of the greenhouses.

Very Short Fiction

There was a thing in the paper last week about writing really, really, short stories. I thought I’d have a go. With apologies to Arthur C. Clark…..

I asked “How do you manage to avoid being found out?”. The wizard smiled and said “Any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology".

Scary Phone Calls

Had a very scary phone conversation today. And made a fool of myself too. It started with a letter on the mat when I got home. “Please ring the Barclaycard fraud hotline” it said in letters that weren’t particularly large and didn’t sound that friendly either. It was signed by someone whose name I forget. But when I rang the number, that person answered. The man himself.

This totally threw me. Barclaycard is a big company. I really didn’t expect to get straight through to the person who wrote the letter. And only yesterday I’d had a phone call from someone at “Windows Support” anxious to tell me about a virus that he knew was on my computer (although he didn’t know my name – asking only to speak to “The person who lives at your address”). Anyway, the chap from Barclaycard started asking me security questions and I started thinking about a scam model where you send someone a letter with a phone number on, get them to ring the number and then ask them for some security questions. And so I asked “How do I know you’re from Barclaycard?”. This threw him. After a while (during which he must have thought some interesting things about me) we decided that I should ring the number printed on the card and talk to them instead. I thanked him and rang off.

I called back on what I now thought would be a proper number and it was all above board. A company I had bought something from a while back had suffered a security breach and my card was therefore “under suspicion”. I get a new card soon, with a different number.

It struck me afterwards that what I did was almost sensible. If the bank is going to spend effort making sure I’m who I say I am, then I should probably put some effort into making sure it really is the bank I’m talking. Although next time I’ll just check the website first.