Announcements for CIS 211

• I've written a little program to calculate your grades. It drops the lowest quiz/homework so far but it does not take the extra credit into account. Please double check your entry in the output file (which is sorted from highest grade to lowest grade). Let me know immediately if you spot an error.

• The final exam will not cover GUIs. We have not covered them in enough detail...

• We (CIS faculty) are trying to determine the right pre-requisites for the 200 sequence. Some of us think we should require some programming experience and some of us think we should require some mathematical aptitude. I am soliciting your feedback: if you could please send me an email with the following format:

  Your grades so far:
  
  Previous programming experience: X years of programming language Y
  
  Math background: (Strong Average Weak)
  (Take your performance in Math 231 and Math 232 into account)
  

  Thanks!

• I have found the bug that caused the anomalous behavior when running infinite loops from the GUI. You might be interested in the process. First I spent a couple of minutes running test6.o and pushing buttons until I could get the anomalous behavior to repeat consistently. Here is the pattern that caused the error pretty consistenly:
  • Load test6.o; click run; click stop; and then click run again, or
  • Load test6.o; click run; click stop; and then click step
  It was then clear that when I click the stop button, the PC's value was somtimes 1 but the GUI always displayed a 0. The PC's value may be 1 if we kill the thread at the point where the instruction was fetched but not yet executed. I confirmed that this was the bug by actually typing a 0 in the PC textarea to force the value of the PC to be 0, and sure enough everything worked as expected. Now it was a matter of two seconds to go to my implementation of the ControlPanel and discover that I do not update the GUI with the machine status after stopping a command. I added the following line to stopCommand:

     machineFrame.refresh();
  

  and now everthing works. You can get the new ControlPanel.class from my ftp directory.

• I am concerned that I am "losing" many of you. In addition to all the people who've already dropped, I can feel that more and more of you are getting discouraged or losing interest. I was thinking that we could have a 10 minute discussion at the end of class on Wednesday. Every one of you is welcome to stay but this discussion is targeted for people who feel they are running out of options and would like to get some ideas on how to proceed in the immediate future and for planning a career. Ginnie Lo, a professor from the deparment, and the chair of the undergraduate education committee, would be happy to discuss some of the issues with you. If you're interested in such a meeting please let me know so that I can arrange for Ginnie to come visit us.

• We have only three lectures left. Here is my plan:
  • Monday: A survey of programming languages (my research area).
  • Wednesday: A survey of computer science emphasizing the future courses you are likely to see at the UO. This will be followed by a presentation by Prof. Art Farley about CIS 212, and possibly a meeting with Prof. Virginia Lo about available options for those who are not doing as well as they expected in CIS 211.
  • Friday: Quick summary of the final exam. Filling teaching evaluation forms. Please bring a #2 pencil.

• Quiz II grades are online.

  0   -- 9:   2
  10  -- 19:  1
  20  -- 29:  2
  30  -- 39:  3
  40  -- 49:  10
  50  -- 59:  16
  60  -- 69:  7
  70  -- 79:  9
  80  -- 89:  13
  90  -- 99:  6
  100 -- 100: 4
  
  Total number of students: 73
  Average = 63
  Weight of quiz = 1 homework
  

  Unfortunately a number of good people did not do so well on this quiz. If you did poorly, remember that I am dropping the lowest grade in the combined category of homework/quiz. Also consider that the weight of any individual homework or quiz is going to be 3.75%. You can get up to 5% by doing extra credit problems. I am also realizing that may be I shouldn't have dropped the first quiz. I apologize for this, but I don't think it is going to affect your grades at all. If you think the first quiz might have affected your grade, positively that is, please come see me, or send me email.

• This message about the design of C++ has been circulating the Internet for a while now. You might get a kick out of it. [Whether it is true or not, I maintain that C++ as an incoherent collection of random stuff.

• John F-L preperated a helpful list of things to read for Lab 8

• Re: 313. I've talked to people in the department ... If you REALLY REALLY need 313 this summer, come to the dept. office and fill out a form explaining why. Having said that, there is little chance that 313 will be offered and you should plan your schedules accordingly.

• An important message from the folks at Klamath B13/26.

• CIS 313 will not be offered this summer. It will offered next fall and winter.

• Please forget about my previous announcement about the JVM seminar. I thought it would be accessible to some of you, but Steve and I realize that it will not. I apologize for the misunderstanding.

• I'll be late on Friday (Feb 27). I'll probably miss my office hours from 9:00 to 10:00.

• Second Midterm will be next Friday (Feb 27) in class. If you are not taking it, don't come to class. Enjoy the weekend!

• Quiz. On Monday March 2, I'll use 20 minutes of class time to give you a couple of small problems about recursion and exceptions.

• If you think CIS 211 is easy to the point of being boring and you have a strong background in mathematics, you should consider the accelerated BS/MS Degree Program in Computer Science. Basically that lets you gets a combined degree or pursue an honors thesis. Contact me or Rachel at the CIS front office for details.

• If you enjoyed solving the Spirited Binary Trees problem, you should consider participating in the UO programming competition this year. It will be held in the first or second week of the spring quarter. Send mail to Professor Gene Luks (luks@cs.uoregon.edu) for details. In addition to being recognized within the department, the UO competition opens the door for the national championship, the ACM programming competition. Winning such a competition is a prestigious addition to your resume.

• I (Amr) will be out of town Thursday: no office hours. Also I was just volunteered to a job Monday afternoon: I'll miss the second half of my office hours. In general I have an open door policy: bug me whenever I am in my office. Send mail if you want to schedule an appointment at hours other than my office hours.

• Second Optional Midterm: For those who want to improve their grades, there will be an additional exam with a maximum of 75. Your midterm grade will be the maximum of the old and new exams.

  If you are interested send me, asap, your preferred date for the new midterm. I want to have it soon, and I need to know how many people want to take it to schedule a room, etc.

• About the first midterm. If you had a perfect solution for Problem 4 but didn't write the code for the abstract class Shape, please come see me. I will give you back the points I took off.

• Spring seminar on the JVM. Steve Fickas and I will be running this seminar in the spring. Let me know if you are interested.

• Midterm grades are online. Here is the distribution:

  100+     7
  90-99   14
  80-89   10
  70-79   14
  60-69   13
  50-59   14
  40-49    7
  30-39    4
  20-29    3
  10-19    1
  

• About the grades for the Instruction lab: If the code that you turned is inconsistent with the output you printed, you got a 0. If you can explain the inconsistency I'll be happy to re-grade your homework. --Amr

• By popular request here is my ioUnit.java.

• I was serious when I was asked about feedback and possible future directions for the class. If you have comments, please let me know now. The remainder of the course is pretty much flexible; it will be hard to make any changes after a couple of weeks.

• Some of you have reported that the book Java Gently used in CIS 199 has better explanations of inheritance than Lewis and Loftus. You might want to give it a look.

• Cheating: The next time I see identical homeworks, I will report the incident to the Student Conduct Coordinator.

• Reminder: The midterm is Wednesday Feb. 11. The preceding Monday (Feb. 9) will be dedicated to review the material we covered so far, and to answer your questions. So be prepared with questions on Monday!

• Questions on Sunday night of the form: "I have no clue what this assignment is about. Please help me." are likely not be answered. It is simply impossible to explain the entire assignment by email.

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• Lab 3 requires that you have a working ALU; future assignments will also require that you have a working Memory. If your assignments were less than perfect, you might want to get my "Memory.class" and "ALU.class" files and use them. (Of course you are encouraged to try writing your own solutions.) The easiest way to get all my ".class" files is to download the jar file.

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• I have graded the quiz. I've decided not to count it towards your grade because there were too many misunderstandings. (You will get your graded copy in the lab and the solution is online for you to study. I am not keeping a record of the grades.) The quiz did serve its purpose though: I am slowing down a bit to reinforce some concepts from 210, and I've prepared a reading list to help you study. Take a look at the study guide off the main page.

• The lab following the ALU is the one dealing with the CPU and IO units (Chapters 6 and 7 respectively). We will get back to Chapter 5 later.

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• On Friday Jan. 23, the first part of the lecture will review the material we have covered so far. In the last 10 minutes, there will be a quiz.

• I (Amr) have graded the first homework. Your grades are online. A few comments:
  • The 100 points were distributed as follows:
    • 60 points for the general structure of the Memory class: 1 or 2 instance variables, 2 constructors, and 3 methods with the right signature,
    • 10 points for proper package and class declarations,
    • 10 points for the fetch and store methods ignoring exceptions,
    • 10 points for throwing the exception.
  • I've ignored handwritten code.
  • Claiming your buggy code executes costs 50 points.
  • Please avoid silly comments:

    	int x = 1; // x is an int with value 1
    	

• There is a lot of copying going around. I am reminding you that homeworks will not be worth more than 10% or 15% at the most of your final grade. In other words, your grade in a particular homework is irrelevant. The only important thing is how well you understand the solution.

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• Since there will be no labs on Jan 19, we will cancel labs on Jan 20, and dedicate Wednesday's lecture (Jan 21) to explain the ALU lab. John Fiskio-Lasseter will give the lecture at the usual time and place.

• Please read the relevant chapter from the lab notes before your lab meeting.