Friday, December 15 2006

15:15:39 MST

I have finished grading Quiz 12... if you take Quiz 12 before it closes tonight, let me know, so I can go back and grade it.

Saturday, December 09 2006

15:47:16 MST

Lecture 31 is now available. Note: I will not be producing slides for lecture 32.

14:40:04 MST

Homework 12 is now available. Sorry for the delay!

Thursday, December 07 2006

13:08:27 MST

Lecture 30 is now available.

Monday, December 04 2006

14:29:38 MST

Quiz 11 has now been graded. If you take Quiz 11 after today, please send me e-mail to let me know you need yours graded.

Sunday, December 03 2006

17:30:50 MST

I have finished grading homework 10. 35 people submitted answers for this assignment. If you are one of the three students that did not submit an answer and you decide to submit it late, send me e-mail to let me know its there. Its otherwise highly unlikely that I would notice on my own that you submitted the assignment late. (Note: this holds true for all of the assignments. If you submit something late, let the TA and me know about it.)

16:28:58 MST

Lecture 29 is now available.

Thursday, November 30 2006

23:37:54 MST

IMPORTANT: DON'T FORGET TO BRING YOUR MIDTERM TO CLASS ON FRIDAY!!!!!

23:32:51 MST

All quizzes are now open until December 15th. If you forgot to take a quiz, you may now take it with the following conditions: 1. You may only do this for up to three quizzes. 2. The standard late penalty of 20% applies, so the maximum score you can receive on one of these make-up quizzes is 8 points. IMPORTANT: once you have taken your make-up quizzes, send me an e-mail message that tells me which quizzes you took, so I know which ones to go back and grade.

23:32:39 MST

Homework 11 is now available.

Tuesday, November 28 2006

21:39:24 MST

The Front Range UNIX Users Group is hosting a talk on Ruby on Rails, a powerful Web application framework implemented in Ruby. The talk will be held in ECCR 245 this thursday (Nov. 30th) at 5 PM. If you like Ruby, you'll probably find Rails very interesting!

21:34:21 MST

IMPORTANT: DON'T FORGET TO BRING YOUR MIDTERM TO CLASS OR LAB THIS WEEK!!!!!

Sunday, November 26 2006

17:19:53 MST

IMPORTANT: BRING YOUR MIDTERM TO CLASS OR LAB THIS WEEK!!!!!

17:19:44 MST

Lecture 28 is now available.

17:19:28 MST

Lab 2 has now been graded. We hope to have Labs 3 and 4 graded soon!

Saturday, November 25 2006

16:59:53 MST

I spent this past week focusing on grading. We now have most of the past class assignments graded. The only assignments left to grade are Labs 2, 3, and 4. I'm going to work on Lab 2 tomorrow.

16:59:44 MST

Lecture 27 is now available.

Friday, November 17 2006

12:31:34 MST

Another clip of a rocket exploding, also found by michelle.

12:27:55 MST

Video of the Ariane 5 disaster. Thanks to michelle bourgeois for finding this on YouTube!

Thursday, November 16 2006

22:36:44 MST

Homework 10 is now available.

14:26:58 MST

Lecture 24 is now available.

Wednesday, November 15 2006

1:00:32 MST

Lab 5 is now available. The TA will supply the username and password for accessing the lab at your lab section. Enjoy!

Sunday, November 12 2006

18:00:49 MST

Lecture 23 is now available.

Friday, November 10 2006

14:44:15 MST

Homework 9 is finally available. Sorry for the delay.

Thursday, November 09 2006

16:18:51 MST

Lecture 22 is now available.

13:52:47 MST

Lecture 21 is now available. Lecture 22 will be available soon!

Thursday, November 02 2006

23:55:54 MST

Homework 8 is now available.

17:54:55 MST

Lecture 20 is now available.

12:58:24 MST

Note: I have added a pointer to this week's lab, that was written (and hosted) by the TA to the Labs section of the website.

Wednesday, October 25 2006

14:23:27 MDT

Homework 7 is now available.

12:29:45 MDT

Lecture 19 is now available.

Tuesday, October 24 2006

13:35:12 MDT

Lecture 18 is now available.

Sunday, October 22 2006

16:25:30 MDT

Lecture 17 is now available.

Friday, October 20 2006

0:47:59 MDT

I have finished grading the midterm. 38 students took the test. The average score was 72 out of 100. The lowest score was 43. The highest score was 94. The most common score (the mode) was 86. The median was 74.5. Finally, the standard deviation was 14 points. I will hand the midterm back on Friday and spend the lecture discussing it.

Tuesday, October 10 2006

23:25:11 MDT

Lab 3 is now available. However, it is password protected. The TA will provide the username and password for the lab at your lab section.

Sunday, October 08 2006

15:48:11 MDT

Lectures 13 and 14 are now available.

Friday, October 06 2006

0:49:48 MDT

Homework 6 is now available.

Wednesday, October 04 2006

16:22:16 MDT

Lecture 12 is now available.

Wednesday, October 04 2006

1:06:53 MDT

Answers for Homework 3 are now available in the Reference Materials section of the website.

Sunday, October 01 2006

16:11:55 MDT

Lecture 11 is now available.

Friday, September 29 2006

0:48:30 MDT

Homework 5 is now available.

Wednesday, September 27 2006

10:44:26 MDT

Lecture 10 is now available.

Monday, September 25 2006

23:33:59 MDT

I have updated the description of homework 4 slightly. In particular, on problem 1, you can simplify the first problem by assuming that the user will only enter strings consisting of letters and spaces. You do not have to worry about punctuation marks. So, a user might enter the string: "aPple PEACHES pumpKin Pie" but not "Ken, how are you feeling today?".

Friday, September 22 2006

17:21:01 MDT

Lecture 9 is now available.

12:46:08 MDT

The Reference Materials section of the website has been updated to point to answers for Lab 0 and Homework 1.

12:16:48 MDT

Here is a pointer to a source of information about the APIs of various programming/scripting languages: http://www.gotapi.com.

Thursday, September 21 2006

14:48:32 MDT

Homework 4 is now available.

11:06:23 MDT

Lecture 8 is now available.

Wednesday, September 20 2006

13:26:19 MDT

The class schedule has been updated with information about the next three weeks of the semester.

Monday, September 18 2006

16:47:36 MDT

Lab 2 is now available. However, it is password protected. The TA will provide the username and password for the lab at your lab section.

Sunday, September 17 2006

15:11:16 MDT

Lecture 7 is now available. See you tomorrow in class!

Thursday, September 14 2006

9:09:23 MDT

Quiz 2 has been created and will be available starting at 11 AM tomorrow. Don't forget!

1:17:32 MDT

Homework 3 is now available.

Wednesday, September 13 2006

14:37:38 MDT

Lecture 6 is now available.

Tuesday, September 12 2006

6:57:58 MDT

Lab 1 has been updated to ask you to also submit the test cases that you developed while working on Lab 1. If you already submitted something for Lab 1, please re-submit an updated .tar.gz file. Thanks.

6:53:05 MDT

Next week in lab 2, you are going to be asked to write simple scripts in the Ruby programming language. If you want to get a head start on learning Ruby, I suggest taking the tutorial at the Try Ruby! website.

Friday, September 08 2006

12:52:49 MDT

Update on Command Substitution: Today in class I was trying to show how quotes can be used to preserve whitespace contained in the output of a program captured by command substitution. When a command is invoked using command substitution, bash simply takes any output generated by the program's standard out and places it in the specified variable. If the output generated by the program contains whitespace then that whitespace is stored in the variable. However bash when it accesses such a variable will strip out any whitespace that it finds replacing runs of whitespace characters with a single space. If you want bash to preserve the embedded whitespace, then you need to surround the variable in double quotes. BUT, the big problem I encountered during Friday is that I used a program that alters its output based on where that output is going. That is, the ls command changes the format of its output depending on whether its output is going to a file, process, or terminal. So, the nice formatting that ls produces for a terminal screen goes away when it is asked to store its output in a file. You can test this with the following two commands:

ls
ls > tmp

In the first command, the output goes to a terminal screen and is nicely formatted. In the second command, the output goes to a file with each entry of the directory on a single line sorted alphabetically. So, ls was a poor example for what I was trying to show. A much better choice would have been the cal program which is a program that can generate calendars to standard out. Try these commands to see what I was trying to show in Friday's lecture:

output=$(cal)
echo $output
echo "$output"

Here the second echo statement produces a nicely formatted calendar because the cal command produced the necessary whitespace while generating its output during the command substitution to make it look good. When the variable is quoted, bash leaves the embedded whitespace characters alone and the output of the original program is preserved.

Let me know if you have any questions!

12:51:04 MDT

Don't forget to take the Quiz 0 and 1 today on the moodle!

Thursday, September 07 2006

15:11:46 MDT

Lecture 5 is now available.

8:30:32 MDT

Quiz 0 will be open again on Friday, along with Quiz 1. For those students who forgot to take Quiz 0 last week, you have another chance to take it. Moving forward in the semester, if you forget to take another quiz, then you will have lost your chance at taking it.

Tuesday, September 05 2006

20:48:50 MDT

Bring your Quigley book to Lab this week. You will find it useful.

20:47:07 MDT

Quite a few students forgot to take Quiz 0 last Friday. I'm still deciding what to do about it. In the future, if you forget a quiz, you will lose the points for it. Since Quiz 0 was the first quiz, I may make an exception and allow the people who forgot to take it a chance to make it up. I'll have a decision by this friday.

20:46:19 MDT

Lab 1 is now available. However, it is password protected. The TA will provide the username and password for the lab at your lab section.

Wednesday, August 30 2006

14:58:08 MDT

One problem encountered by students today in lab section was that some students had a non-bash login shell. For this class, you need to make sure that your login shell is set to bash. To do this, login to the csel.cs.colorado.edu website and click on the Your CSEL Account link. Then, click on the Change CSEL Login Shell and select /bin/bash as your login shell. Click submit and your login shell will be changed to bash.

14:42:10 MDT

Update to Lab 0 Due Date: Because some students were not able to finish Lab 0 in lab section today, I have extended the deadline to 11:59 PM tomorrow (Thursday) night. If you submitted an incomplete lab due to running out of time, you now have an extra day to work on finishing the lab.

Tuesday, August 29 2006

11:57:45 MDT

Mea Culpa! On Monday, a student asked if you needed any special information in order to sign up for the class moodle. I said no which turned out to be completely false, as you need to enter an enrollment key in order to access the moodle for this class. Sigh. The TA will provide you with the enrollment key at your lab session. If you want it before then, send me e-mail. My apologies for the mistake!

Monday, August 28 2006

8:12:47 MDT

Wondering where ECCR 1B51 is? Look here.

Saturday, August 26 2006

11:40:38 MDT

IMPORTANT: The lab sections for this class will be held in the CSEL. You need to make sure that you have an account on the CSEL machines and that you have Buff OneCard access to the lab BEFORE your first lab section. Fortunately, the process is straightforward.

1. You can create an account on the CSEL machines via the PLUS system. Follow the instructions at <https://csel.cs.colorado.edu/main/creating-accounts.html>.
2. After you have created an account, go to <http://csel.cs.colorado.edu/> and log in.
3. Click on the link Your CSEL Account and then click on the link Set Buff OneCard Number and follow the instructions.
4. You're done and are now ready for the first lab session.

Thursday, August 24 2006

23:04:51 MDT

The evaluation section and Homework 2 are now available. Website is now ready to deploy. (I'll work on Lab 1 later!)

22:22:58 MDT

Website almost ready to deploy. Lecture 4, Homework 1, Quiz 0, the schedule, and the syllabus have been created. Still need to finish the evaluation section, Homework 2, Quiz 2, and Lab 1.

Thursday, August 10 2006

0:27:25 MDT

Lab 0 is now available.

0:27:02 MDT

Lectures 1 and 2 are now available.

Wednesday, August 02 2006

13:52:45 MDT

Construction of the Fall 2006 class website for CSCI 3308 has begun! This website will provide access to lectures, labs, and other useful information. If you are student in this class, be sure to visit this site daily!