To the members of my section of CSCIE160:

Welcome to the course and to my section. This semester marks my fourth tour as a "distance" TF. Some years ago I ran a live section in Prof. Sawyer's C++ course, at a time when homework implementations were printed on paper and handed in at the section meetings -- how primitive, eh? I actually had to carry a large briefcase during that time, a thing I had never done before nor have done since.

Previous semesters have been an education for me, both in distributed programming for Java and in the pitfalls of distance ed. Consequently I'd like to present here a sort of manifesto, to set your expectations of me and to convey mine of you.

First, I don't intend to hold a regularly scheduled section meeting by IRC or anything similar. I think that one of the big advantages of online education is the freedom from scheduled events. You can view the lectures when it's convenient for you. The big disadvantage is that you lose opportunities for interacting with the professor and with your peers.

One of the resources you have that compensates to some degree for this disadvantage is your online TF, who is available usually at short notice to answer questions or consult with you. I will be available by email every day, including most weekends and such. I'll usually respond within an hour or two during the work day; somewhat less predictably during evening and weekend hours. That is, unless I don't know the answer to your question -- in which case doing the research to find the answer might take a bit longer!

Another resource is the course bulletin board, which you can find via a link from the main course web page. It may well be that the question or problem you are having has already been discussed and resolved on the bulletin board, and you can get your answer immediately from there.

Homework

Homework should be submitted via this web site. Please browse to that page now, and create an account for yourself. When you log in there, you'll be presented with a summary of your submission status for each of the seven homework assignments. On the summary page, there is a form for uploading the homework implementations as .jar files. The web site is a bit rough around the edges; it will improve as the weeks go by. If it gives you any trouble please let me know.

Homework should be submitted as a .jar archive file in the format described on the main course web page

In addition to the guidelines given there, please note the following:

• The attachment should be a .jar file, not a .zip or anything else.
• It should contain a directory hierarchy that matches the package names.
• Please put the .java files in the same directory as the corresponding .class files.
• The root of the directory hierarchy within the .jar file should be relative to the current directory, and not an absolute path.

For example, for homework #1, the contents of the hw1.jar file should appear something like the following:

  cscie160/hw1/Elevator.java
  cscie160/hw1/Elevator.class
  cscie160/hw1/Overview.txt
  cscie160/hw1/output.txt
  cscie160/hw1/doc/Elevator.html and other .html files

Please don't put any files at the top level directory. Every file in the .jar should extract into a directory below cscie160/hw1, so that I can tell easily to which assignment it belongs.

The main course web page says that the solution should be executable directly from the jar file. This means that you must make a command such as "java -classpath hw1.jar cscie160.hw1.Elevator" work correctly. It DOES NOT mean that you must make "java -jar hw1.jar" work. I won't require you to know the arcana involving MANIFEST.MF that is required to make this work, and there are several assignments that need multiple "main" methods (e.g. a client and a server in the same .jar file) where it's not at all clear which class should be blessed as the main class.

In your homework implementations, please adhere to the assignment specification as closely as possible. Resist the temptation to go far beyond what is required by the spec. I will develop a list of particular things I'll look for in each assignment, and if the code wanders it makes more work for me, to figure out if the wandering is justifiable.

Finally, my goal is to help you make an "A". If you send me a draft of your homework implementation along with specific questions about it, I will try to help you get it right. If you submit homework that is not "A" work, I will critique it and invite you to resubmit with corrections. I must draw the line there, though -- I won't accept more than two submissions. If there are multiple problems with a submission, I can't guarantee to catch all of them the first time around.

Best regards, and I look forward to working with you.