As you explore the Internet and the World Wide Web, you will quite likely encounter documents called FAQs. This is an acronym that stands for Frequently Asked Questions, and, as that name implies, these documents are commonly used to collect answers to questions which are asked often.For the purposes of our course work, I have decided to start collecting such questions and their answers here for the benefit of my students (past, present, and future). If you have an idea for something that you would like to see on this page, please let me know by e-mail at amgilder@cs.unh.edu.
If you have a computer at home, you may be able to do a significant part of your course work from home. Just how much of it you can do from home, however, depends upon a couple of different factors.
First, do you have the proper software available? Some of the software we use in class, such as Notepad and Telnet (for Windows) and SimpleText (for the Macintosh), is part of the systems software and it should be available on every computer with that operating system installed; all you need to do it find it on your hard disk. Other software we use, such as WS_FTP, Fetch, BetterTelnet, Netscape Communicator, and Microsoft Internet Explorer, is available for download via the World Wide Web (or may be supplied as part of the software package you get when you establish an account with an ISP). So you can easily obtain your own copies and install them if you don't already have this software. Other software, however, such as the components of Microsoft Office 97 (or 98 on the Macintosh), must be purchased prior to installation on your own computer. Since these commercial applications are typically rather expensive (especially from the perspective of a student's budget), it may not be worth the investment simply to be able to do your work at home; especially when use of the public clusters is free. However, if you do not already have this software available, you can purchase it at a significant academic discount from the University Technology Center.
Second, do you have some way to connect your home computer to the Internet? To connect your computer to the Internet, the first thing you need is either an appropriate network adapter card (if you live in a hardwired dorm or apartment) or a modem (if you live anyplace else). The next thing you need is some form of service provider. If you live in a hardwired dorm or apartment, your best bet is probably to arrange for a ResNet connection. If you live anyplace else, you'll probably need to establish an account with an Internet Service Provider (ISP), if you don't already have one. Once you are setup with access to the Internet, you will be able to run a terminal emulator such as Telnet, BetterTelnet, or QVTTerm on your home computer and use it to access the host named cisunix.unh.edu. This will allow you to do any UNIX related work, such as working on your Web pages or accessing pine, from home. This will also allow you to run network-related applications such as WS_FTP, Fetch, and Web browsers from home.
Note, however, that even if you do have a ResNet account or an ISP account, you will still not be able to access the file servers on the cluster Micronet. Therefore, you will not have access to the software applications available in the clusters from home. More importantly, you will not have access to any data files that are stored on the cluster file servers. Therefore, when an assignment will require you to copy one or more files from the cluster file servers, you will need to go into the clusters at least long enough to copy these files onto a floppy diskette so you can take them home.
Over several years of teaching, I have noticed that attendance in lectures overwhelmingly correlates to grades; those students who attend lecture regularly tend to get the higher grades, and those who miss lectures frequently tend to get the lower grades, whether I explicitly consider attendance when grading or not.
Therefore, I strongly recommend that you make every effort possible to make it to lecture. However, life is complicated, and I realize that it is not always possible to make it to lecture.
If you must miss a lecture, it certainly doesn't hurt to drop me a quick note by e-mail letting me know. However, please realize that you are responsible for making up the missed material on your own. It is simply not practical for me to repeat an entire lecture for one individual, regardless of their reason for having missed it.
When you must miss a lecture, your primary concern should be to fill in the gap in your notes. A complete set of notes will be much more helpful than a partial set when you settle down to study for an exam. Since I don't provide copies of my lecture notes (for a variety of reasons, foremost amongst which is the fact that they are written to keep me on track and do not necessarily reflect what I would expect a student to have in their notes at the end of a lecture), you will need to get the notes from someone else in the class. Since every student's perspective of a lecture is different, you may even find it helpful to get notes from several of your classmates and combine them. If you initially photocopy their notes for convenience, I strongly recommend that you copy them over into your own notebook by hand; you are much more likely to absorb the material this way.
In addition to filling the gap in your notes, I also strongly recommend that you pay particular attention to any reading associated with the missed lecture in the syllabus. Doing, or redoing, this reading especially carefully will likely be helpful in filling in any gaps in your understanding and the notes you have just copied.
If, after you have copied the notes from at least one of your classmates and done a careful pass through any associated readings, you have specific questions about the material you have missed, I will be happy to meet with you to provide the answers you are lacking.
There are two things you need to know to answer this question, and both are incorporated into other parts of this presentation. First, you need to know the weightings applied to the various tasks you will be assigned throughout the semester. And second, you should read the note describing how I determine final letter grades.
If you still have questions on the grading process after reviewing these two resources, please let me know.
There is usually a Print item under a window's File menu that allows you to print the document currently displayed in that window, and this is often the best (and simplest) way to print what you see in the window. However, there are times when that's not really what you want. Instead, you actually want a picture of the window.
To accomplish this, you first need to click in some part of the window to make it the active window. This will bring it into the foreground in front of all other open windows. Now, hold down the Alt key while you press the PrintScreen key once. This places a "snapshot" of the active window into the Clipboard. Note that you won't see anything visibly happen at this point either on the screen or the printer. That's because the image is just sitting on the Clipboard. To get it off the Clipboard and displayed someplace where it can be printed, you need to paste it into a document. While there are several types of documents into which you might paste this image, the handiest is often a WordPad document (since WordPad should be available on all Windows 95/98 computers). You should find WordPad in the Start menu under Programs:Accessories. Launch it and then select Paste from its Edit menu. This should bring a copy of the window snapshot from the Clipboard and insert it into the current WordPad document. All that remains is to print the WordPad document by choosing Print from the File menu.
There is usually a Print item under the File menu that allows you to print the document currently displayed in the active window, and this is often the best (and simplest) way to print what you see in the window. However, there are times when that's not really what you want. Instead, you actually want a picture of the window.
To accomplish this, you first need to make sure the window which you want to print is fully visible on the screen. The easiest way to do this is click in some part of the window to make it the active window. This will bring it into the foreground in front of all other open windows. Now, hold down the Shift and Command keys together while you press the 3 key once. This places a "snapshot" of the screen into a SimpleText file. Note that you won't see anything visibly happen at this point either on the screen or the printer, but if you listen closely you should hear a sound like a camera shutter snapping. The trick at this point is finding the file that was just created by your action. The file will be named "Picture n" where n is a small number, and it will be stored at the topmost level of the startup disk. The startup disk is easy to identify because its icon is the one closest to the upper right corner of the screen. Double-clicking its icon will open the disk window, and in this window you should see your file. Note that there may be other files with similar names left over from previous attempts. Generally, yours will be the one with the highest number (if not, view the files by date and pick the newest one). Once you've identified your file, double-click its icon to load that file into SimpleText. Within SimpleText, you can select any rectangular region of the displayed image by clicking the mouse in the upper left corner of the area you want to select and dragging the mouse to the lower right corner of the area you want to select. Use this technique to select the area of the image occupied by the desired window, and then select Copy from the Edit menu. Now, you have an image of the selected area on the Clipboard, and you can paste it into a variety of applications for printing. Since you already have SimpleText open, the easiest thing to do is select New from the File menu to get an empty document and then select Paste from the Edit menu to paste the contents of the Clipboard into this empty document. All that remains is to choose Print from the File menu to print the new document you've just created.
First, you need to know that the ls command is used to create directory listings. If you wish to create a long form of the directory listing which shows detailed information about each file and subdirectory, you would use ls -l instead. If you do not provide any other arguments on the command line, the ls command lists the contents of your current directory.
Next, you need to know that you can redirect the results of any command line so that rather than going to the screen they go into a file. To do this, you need to append the redirection symbol (>) and the name of file into which you wish the results to be redirected. For example:
ls -l > listing
would generate a long form listing of the current directory and redirect the results to a file named listing. If this file does not exist prior to issuing this command, it will be automatically created. If the file already exists, its contents will be replaced. Either way, the file will contain the results of the command.
Finally, you need to know how to print a file. To do this, you would use the lpr command. To tell the lpr command what format you wish it to use, it's common practice to specify one of the available formats as the first argument on the command line, and since the lpr command needs to know what file you wish to print you must tell it the file name as the last argument on the command line. Thus, to print the listing file created above, you would use the command line:
lpr -C white listing
where -C white specifies the desired format and listing
specifies the name of the file to be printed.
The lpr command sends its output to the printers in the Kingsbury machine room, which is on the first floor of Kingsbury Hall at the end closest to Morse Hall. It may take a few hours, but eventually your printout will be placed on the shelves in the hallway outside the machine room for you to pick up. It will have a cover sheet stapled to it which prominently displays your cisunix login name.