Here you can find the course news, reproduced from the individual
outlines.
Wednesday, February 16, 2000:
- Cool upcoming events:
- Convocation Thursday: Richard Guy on ``Mathematics 4000 Years Ago''
- CS Brown Bag Lunch Thursday: Growing a Language
- Math/CS Journal Club Thursday: Fun at IBM
- When you compile your C files, it helps to use the
-Wall
flag (which tells the compiler to print out warnings for any odd bit
of code).
- If you use make, put the following at the top of your files and
then don't explicitly specify how to make the .o files.
- Are there any final questions on
assignment 2?
- I'll be in my office much of tomorrow. While I'll primarily be
working on grading and some stuff I need to write, I will be happy
to stop and answer reasonable questions.
- A few of you asked how I printed your code ``two up''. Here's
the alias I put in my
.cshrc:
alias twoup "nenscript -2r -p- \!* | lp -oduplex";
- Quiz! Error correcting codes
Monday, February 14, 2000:
- A number of you have reported difficulty with
Assignment 2.
To give you a chance to talk to me about those difficulties,
I am extending the due date until Friday.
- Please do come talk to me.
- In the C that I learned, it was dangerous to pass a struct to
a function or return a struct from a function.
- I'd strongly recommend that you write a wrapper class for
your node class.
- Assignment 1 has
been (mostly) graded.
- Some notes
are available.
- We'll spend a few minutes on common errors.
- For Wednesday's class, find out something useful about an
error-correcting code. That is, identify an error-correcting
code and learn how it works.
Friday, February 11, 2000:
- Because I have not yet returned assignment 1, I'm extending
the due date for assignment 2 until Wednesday.
- I expect to return assignment 1 on Monday.
Wednesday, February 9, 2000:
- If you want more information on pointers and memory, it might
help to read the Stanford CS Library's documentation on pointers
and memory. I've made
a local copy.
- As some of you have learned (or already know), I get much too much
email. This means that I tend to leave less crucial email until
later. In particular, I typically ignore emailed assignments until
I grade them. Hence, if you send in a question on an assignment
the same day an assignment is due, I will not read it until much
later. Please start messages you want me to read with something
like "READ ME NOW!" or "IMPORTANT" or "HELP".
- Are there questions on homework
2?
Monday, February 7, 2000:
- A few of you have asked me about compilers for the Wintel
platform. I would suggest using some form of GCC.
- Assigned:
Friday, February 4, 2000:
- Are there questions on the remainder of Wednesday's lab?
- Are there questions on assignment 1?
- A few of you have noted that in some circumstances, you cannot
re-bind the socket for a few minutes. That's fine.
- Some of you have asked where to find the standard .h files. You can look
in
/usr/include. For example,
-
<stdio.h> is in
/usr/include/stdio.h
-
<netinet/in.h> is in
/usr/include/netinet/in.h
Wednesday, February 2, 2000:
- If you haven't bought K&R, it may be worth getting copies of the
Stanford handouts (see the links page
for more details.
- For the next few classes, I'll try to mix short lectures with lab
exercises.
- Assignments:
- HW 1: A Chat Program
(due Monday)
Monday, January 31, 2000:
- Some of you have asked about context switches. A context
switch occurs when computation switches from one process to another
(or from one thread of computation to another). That is, one
computation is interrupted and another starts (or resumes).
When you switch context, you must save the state of the current
computation (registers, sometimes the stack, etc.) and then
restore them when the thread resumes.
- I expect that Wednesday will be a laboratory, but we'll see.
Friday, January 28, 2000:
- I'm hoping that there are more of you interested in summer work than
attended yesterday's presentation.
- Monday at noon in Science 2413, the Computer Science Bag Lunch
Film festival will resume with ``The Future of Computing: Seizing
the Future We Want''. You may find it interesting to attend.
- There are no specific readings in The C Programming Language
for Monday. Simply start reading through the book.
- I've heard that there are only two students in the Exotic Programming
Languages group this semester. Since the group is studying Python,
a ``hot'' Web programming language, I'd expect to see more.
- I received some requests that I not give in-class exams this semester,
so I won't. Expect to see changes to the syllabus.
- I've started to go over your surveys, but haven't finished.
- You can find some
initial responses online.
- Some of you (particularly those of you with just 152 as background)
are worried that this will be over your head. I'll do my best to
keep the pace reasonable, and the material should be understandable.
- Most of you do your best studying before 10 p.m. That is certainly
different than I'd expect from CS folks :-)
Wednesday, January 26, 2000:
- Final reminder: On Thursday, January 27, at noon, I'll be giving a
presentation on summer opportunities in computing and computer science.
Even if you don't plan to do summer work in computing this summer,
you should come and begin to think about options for the
following summer. I expect to take at least one sophomores.
- Due today: A description of Dijkstra's shortest path algorithm
and a big-O analysis of that algorithm.
- Also today: a quiz.
- For Friday, finish reading Chapter 1 of Peterson and Davie.
- I did not receive responses to the
introductory survey
from all of you. Please fill it out ASAP.
Monday, January 24, 2000:
- Assignments (for Wednesday):
- Make sure to complete the
Introductory survey
for Wednesday's class! (A few students always seem to miss this.)
- At noon on Thursday, January 27 in Science 2424 I'll be giving a presentation
on summer opportunities in computing and computer science. Some
opportunities are available for non-majors.
- I know that many of you are prospective majors worrying about how
to put together a major, so please feel free to come talk to me
about scheduling. It is possible to be a CS major and still take
a semester abroad.
- As usual, I'll start the course with a number of questions, some
of which are answered in the course outline. Please don't refer
to the outline when coming up with your answers.