No Two Ways

I've been marking student projects for a while now and it never ceases to amaze me how, given the same problem, lots of people can come up with different answers. Some are much worse than the one I thought of, others are better. I love this (except for the ones which are way better than my design of course..)

Some of the students want to know what the "right" answer is. But of course there is no right answer. Some are faster, some are smaller, some are easier to use and some are easier to maintain. When you get good at this game you start to recognise the tradeoffs and can even code to make things big and fast (i.e. look up table) or small and slow (i.e. work it out each time). Me, I always write code for maximum clarity these days. The processors can stand a little inefficiency and I rate my time above any computers.

Shiny Class Server

Anyone who knows me knows that I am a sucker for bright, new, shiny objects. Today Rob and Claire from Microsoft came over to Hull and showed us Microsoft Class Server. It is very bright, and very shiny. OK, so it is is technically not an object, although I suppose that object oriented design technology was used in the creation of the system which means that .......

But I digress. If, for example, you were a lecturer at one of the premier universities in the UK, giving the grateful students the benefit of your wisdom and knowledge. Say you want to make your life easier in terms of deploying courseware, managing assessments and providing feedback to students. Then you are going to find Class Server very shiny indeed, because that is just what it does.

Basically, I want in. I'm so impressed that I'm going to test fly it on the shiny new, joke packed, C# module which I will be giving to those lucky enough to be selected for the first year of our course this year. What's more, I'm going to have a crack at extending it and adding some kind of Wiki-ness, which should also be fun and enhance the learning experience. I'll let you know what colour smoke I get...

Another Day, Another Hull Winner

It seems that all Hull students do is win competitions. Hot on the heels of the news that two Hull students were in the top teams in the Imagine Cup UK heats this year (kudus to Mat Steeples for being in the winning team) it seems that another Matt, Matt Jones, has won a BCS essay competition. It must be all in the name!

Anyhoo, Matt now gets to spend a few days hob-nobbing with the great and the good in IT on a cruise ship. He's promised to blog about the event, I'll post a link when I get one from him.

It must be something about Hull that drives students to enter competitions and win them. I put it down to the quality of the lecturing staff...

Virus Thoughts Two

Imagine you run a delivery company. Imagine that the manufacturer of the little vans that you use sends you a message saying that they've found a fault with the tyres and if it rains your little vans might go off the roads and crash. The van maker offers you a free fix to make them safe. Imagine you ignore that message.

Of course the next time it rains heavily some of your little vans do crash and cause damage and upset.

So, who is at fault here? I think it is fair to say that your delivery company is more than a bit to blame. Of course it would have caused you difficulty and upset to fix your vans. And you can argue that there should never have been a fault with the vans in the first place. But I think in this situation any company would have made darned sure that the problem did not arise.

The Sasser virus upset is exactly the same situation. Except that companies who rely on computer support do not take their computers as seriously as their little vans. Viruses are just like the weather. Now and again you get a hurricane. Now and again some buffoon thinks it "might be neat" to send something out on the internet and see what happens.

If I lose a seat on a plane because of the Sasser virus, I'm not going to be chasing an 18 year old German idiot, I'm going to be banging the desk at the checkout shouting about the duty of care owed me by the airline to make sure that their systems don't fail in this way (and hoping that their maintenance policy for their airplanes is somewhat more rigorous...)

So, no trombone then

I've talked to a few people about trombones and they tell me that they are much harder to play than the piano (which I seem to have given up) and the guitar (which I seem to have given up). Basically you have to blow a raspberry down a pipe and then adjust the length to get the right note. The raspberry bit sounds fun I suppose, but not for several hours at a time. Hmmm. I think I might put this aspect of my musical ambitions on hold for a moment.. And remember, there is always the banjo.

Oh, and I put "trombone playing dog" into Google and wasn't rewarded with any hits which were particularly useful. And Ebay were no help either.