Dec 27

Entry for Challenge #3 will close on 30th Dec at 13:20.

Are you smart enough to find the message by then?


Dec 21

Ready for next semester, we are looking to recruit a team of undergraduates and postgraduates to join us in the day-to-day running of the ECS Systems Support service.

As a member of our crew you will be paid at full demonstrator rates and gain prestigious and valuable experience working for the School.

We are looking to build a team of around 12 people, each of whom will be offered either one or two two-hour slots per week (depending on timetabling). During your shift, you will have your own desk in the Helpdesk office and take part in our front line support activities.

Read More


Dec 21

Two interesting things have happened with Challenge #3:

  1. Another clue has appeared online.
  2. We have discovered that the packet of custard has a fiver stapled to it!

Dec 13

And on to the next one… This challenge is a bit more visual than the last two. See if you can decode the old man’s dying message…

Go to the Challenges page and click on #3.


Dec 13

Congratulations are in order for ‘Al’ G, who was the first person to work out that the code represents the phrase “the blood of fugitives is cold”.

Al, your HB pencil is in a safe place ready for you to collect it.

The solution required you to realise that the 13-digit number was in fact an ISBN, in this case for “Death of a Dissident” by Marina Litvinenko. B+PLW was used to indicate Book+Page, Line, Word. The triplets of numbers (separated from each other by colons) each indicated a word in the book. To be helpful and save you from having to buy the book, the source words were kept to those available through Amazon’s “Look Inside” feature.

Congratulations also to: Dave C, Paul T, Chris P, Darren R and Sascha B who all got this correct! Well done, folks.


Dec 10

Top Mistakes To Avoid #3: Printing On Hand-In Day

Many people seem to have decided that the very best time to do all of their printing is on the afternoon of the deadline.

Do remember that this will maximise your chances of being stuck in a long print queue, or discovering that the person ahead of you has just printed 45 pages of solid black and simultaneously emptied the toner cartridge and jammed up the fuser unit. You should take this risk into account when you work out how long you need.

Printing, binding and finishing are all part of the time allocation required to complete your project work, so it is up to you to manage this time effectively. Do remember that leaving your printing too late is not a valid excuse for late submissions.

Handy hint: colour printers take around twice as long per page and are 50% more expensive than their super-fast black-and-white cousins.

For jobs with only a few colour pages, send the black and white pages to the black and white printer and print the colour pages separately – this saves time and money.


Dec 10

Challenge #2 has been correctly solved (for a little while), and so entires for it will close on Friday afternoon at 5pm. The solution and the list of winners will be posted some as-yet-undetermined interval after that.

– HD


Dec 10

Congratulations to: Matthew A (mca1..)
who was the first person with the right answer to Challenge #1

Also congratulations to: ‘Al’ G (tag1…), Clare L and friends (cl27…), Anna A (ama1…), Steve HP (shp1..), Tom O (to1…), Owen S (os1…), Peter L (pjcl1..), Paul T (pjt2…) and Rachel G (rng1…)
all of whom provided at the correct answer with a suitable explanation.

A mention also to Andy D (ad10…) who came so close but sadly missed out the all-important explanation. Don’t forget!

For the rest of you that didn’t make the cut:

You needed to begin at the very beginning – the top of the Challenges page – where you would have seen the text “Gur rairybcr vf oruvaq gur ybbfr oevpx!”. This shows an example of a substitution cipher in use, in this case a simple alphabetic shift (Caesar cipher). One of you gave us the wrong shift size (saying 14 instead of 13), but we let you have it anyway. It’s a 13-character Caesar shift, which in computing terms is also often known as “ROT13”. ROT13 used to be a favourite on internet newsgroups to hide information from casual browsing, although its cryptographic strength is practically nil.

Well done to everyone who got it right!


Dec 3

You may have noticed that we have taken a delivery of new PCs and monitors in the labs. Some of the older machines are being replaced over the next few days, which is all very exciting. Please bear with us while we get the new equipment unpacked and installed.

Since we always get asked, it’s worth mentioning that the outgoing machines don’t get thrown out. Instead, they move on to more sedate careers, in less demanding places than the teaching lab.

– HD


Dec 3

Challenge #1 has been correctly solved, and so entires for it will close on Friday afternoon at 5pm. The solution and the list of winners will be posted some time shortly after that.

We will be keeping a rolling leaderboard of people who solve the challenges correctly so it’s worth getting an entry in, especially on the easy puzzles.

– HD