So I got back from Oxford last night, after heading over for an interview for a Msc in Computer Science. I'd heard a number of stories of the type of questions that arise in interviews there so I was expecting to be asked to stand on my head, throw a brick through a window, explain the meaning of 42 and all the while knitting a fine woolen coat (possibly a slight exaggeration).

In the end the questions were comparably mundane. Basically 15-20 minutes of 'Why Oxford?', 'Why the course?' etc and then two math problems which were as follows:

1) You have a M x N grid of squares. How many different rectangles can you create. Partial overlaps are allowed.

2) Given an ordered sequence s, containing elements such that for the sequence x, y, z, x < y < z, give an efficient algorithm that calculates how many pairs of elements add up to t, some integer value. e.g. an example of s would be {2, 3, 7, 9, 13, 15}; the number of pairs here is two, {13, 3} and {7, 9} 

Answers on a stamped, addressed envelope to nnp[symbol here]unprotectedhex.com ;) 

What follows is a short (1600 words), and probably devisive, discussion of why I think many open source projects would be better served by a license other than the GNU GPL. (Cheers to Sully for fixing my rather appaling grammar and proof reading)

It is also available in PDF and RTF fomats  

"The GNU General Purpose License (GPL) is a tenet of the open source community, and considered by many to be the foundation of the open source movement. It facilitates the free and unhindered distribution and modification of software whilst protecting this software and its copyright owners from a multitude of potential abuses. Of course, under critical analysis, some troublesome issues arise that have serious implications for the hardworking open source community, and indicate that the interests of the programmer are not the primary concern of its creators, the Free Software Foundation (FSF), or even the license itself."