Semester 1

‘Programming’ (Introduction to Java)


From the very top (‘how to assign values to variables’ and all that). Even so, this made me feel like a child for the first time in a decade, by which I mean ‘utterly incompetent, scared, and without the means to redress either of these things’. Teaching is extremely up to the task, though.

Topics: the basics, Object-orientation, inheritance, GUIs, recursion.

Instructor: Funny, charming, slightly ridiculous.
Inherent interest: Medium.
Assessments: 50%
Marking: Easy.





Information Systems and Databases


Absolutely essential stuff, but dulll. A misnomer, too: the first third is basic web development (HTML, CSS, XML, tiny dab of PHP too). There’s not a lot to it – my exam notes came to four A4 pages overall – but the key bricks of it ERD, SQL, normalisation are frustrating enough to pad it out. Databasing actually has some intellectual interest – how does one cope with dozens of people read and changing the same data at once? – but not as presented here.

Instructor: Competent. Sympathetic (as students are to other students).
Inherent interest: Low.
Slides: Long but far from self-sufficient. There are cat photos.
Assessments: Linked series of assessments where you design a website with an associated database. Lots of freedom, lots of painful uncertainty. 30%
Marking: Fair (by which I mean strict)






Systems and Networks


‘In reality (in the processor)…’

Circuit diagrams, binary arithmetic, the hardware architectures, : the reality that all the other courses talk two to five levels of abstraction from. Lewis Mackenzie was a physicist, and this raw contact with the reality of the thing shines through – at one point he calculated the distance travelled by light in a nanosecond in order to demonstrate why miniaturisation has been the driving factor in processor improvement, etc, etc, etc.

Instructor: Inspiring, earnest.
Inherent interest: Medium
Slides: Everything’s there. No extra reading.
Assessments: Have to do two assessments in Assembler, which is still not quite a mere history lesson. 6811. 20%.
Marking: Fair (by which I mean strict)






Requirements Engineering


The dreary managerial and practical side: you will code for dullards all your career, here is how to talk to them. Some flashes of spirit: “Developers are the nodes that do the work. Managers are the nodes that collect the money”. Skippable.

Instructor: Two, both phoned-in.
Inherent interest: Very low
Slides: Fairly detailed.
Assessments: Pair of very tiresome corporate documentation simulations. 30%
Marking: Fair (by which I mean strict)






+ Elective: Human-Centred Security



The psychology and sociology of security, rather than the high applied mathematics of it.

Instructor: Inspiring
Inherent interest: High
Slides: Mostly just images and Final Thoughts.
Assessments: One large and contrived human psychology experiment. 40%
Marking: Fair (by which I mean strict)