CS 372H: Announcements

Announcements will be posted here.

• 5/19: Final grades submitted to registrar.
  Have a nice summer!
  
• 5/19: Exam scores and final project scores posted on egradebook
  The comments on those assignments on egradebook give you some information about the grading. Here is roughly what it says. For the final exam, the mean was 69.55, the standard deviation was 11.79, and the high score was 93.5. For final projects, we graded them with letters and then mapped them to particular numbers. The mapping is listed on egradebook. By the way, many of you did a really nice job on the projects. We (Namrata and Mike) were both excited and impressed by what you put together.
  
• 5/18: Final exam and solutions posted on exams page
  Grades will be filed by tomorrow evening at the latest.
  
• 5/16: Exam details
  The study session notes have most of the details. The emphasis will be on the second half of the semester, but the first half will be covered.
  
• 5/16: Notes from study session posted here and on schedule page
  
  
• 5/13: Sample finals and solutions posted on exam page
  Note, though, that this year's exam may not hew closely to the format of the samples.
  
• 5/13: Final will be closed book, but you can bring TWO two-sided sheets of notes
  As with the midterm, you may bring sheets of notes. Note that whereas for the midterm you had ONE two-sided sheet, for the final, you may bring TWO two-sided sheets, for a total of four sides of printing. As with the midterm, we have formatting requirements for each sheet. Here they are: Times New Roman font, minimum 10 point font, minimum 1 inch margins on all sides, maximum 60 lines per side (which is a busy single-spaced sheet). Please do not exceed 1 inch margins, even if it means that you cannot fit 60 lines per side. If you use handwriting, same deal: your handwriting should be no smaller than 10pt, your margins should be at least 1 inch, etc., etc.
  
• 5/11: Office hours during finals
  Here are the remaining office hours:
  • Friday, May 15: 2:00--3:00 PM (Mike)
  • Monday, May 17: 4:00--6:00 (Mike)
  If neither of these times works for you, you can either bring your question to Sunday night's study session or email to set up an appointment. We are excited to discuss the course material and help you prep for the exam, so if you have questions or uncertainties about the material, definitely drop by. However, please do not ask questions of the form, 'Do we have to know X?' or 'Will Y be covered?' The answer to these questions will always be the same: if it was covered by the course material, it is fair game for the exam.
  
• 5/6: The story of Mel
  You may enjoy the story of Mel, a classic folk tale. Recently, people (re)learned that Mel is real.
  
• 5/6: Room and time announced for final study session
  Final study session (like a review but different, given university policies) is Sunday, May 16, 7:00-9:00 PM, TAY 3.128
  
• 5/4: Office hours reshuffled on May 7
  Mike's office hours canceled this Friday, May 7. Instead, Namrata will have office hours from 10:00-11:00 on Friday. There won't be fixed office hours the following week, but we'll be around, and you can email to set up an appointment.
  
• 4/30: Lab 7 deadline extended to Sunday, May 9, 9:00 PM.
  
  
• 4/27: If you are choosing the in-class demo option......
  .... please send email to the course staff alias by 9:00 PM, Monday, May 3.
  
• 4/27: Final project logistics -- demos and late hours -- now listed on Lab 7 page
  
  
• 4/19: Added (short) reading/prep assignment for Thursday
  In preparation for a guest lecture on copyright protection and copyright law this Thursday, we have posted a reading and video assignment. The two together should take no more than 15 minutes, and they should be entertaining. Please complete them before class. As always, the reading assignment is listed on the schedule page. Please let us know if you have trouble viewing the video.
  
• 4/17: Lab 7 code updated
  If you have started lab 7, please get the small update that we pushed to the submission rule in the Makefile: "git-fetch && git-checkout lab7 && git merge origin/lab7"
  
• 4/16: Lab 7 released.
  It is due on Friday, May 7
  
• 4/15: QEMU and GDB reference posted (and linked from within lab 6). Thanks Namrata!
  
  
• 4/15: Some other updates, plus git merging
  Third and ideally last update. Depending on how you have been working and which branch is checked out, in order to get the latest changes, you may need to do a git-merge into lab6. If you have not already created your lab6 branch, just do "git pull". If you have already created your lab6 branch, then, to be safe, you probably want: "git pull && git checkout lab6 && git merge origin/lab6". If you get conflicts from git, just resolve the conflicts in the file (throw away any lab7 tests, for example), then do "git add [conflicted files] && git commit". git will realize that this latest commit is a merge (in git-speak, it has two parents).
  
• 4/15: Updated lab6 code again
  This update, among other things, sends console output to the serial port which means that you can run QEMU in graphics mode and see the output in your terminal window (as you used to have for bochs). Please get the update by typing, inside your ~/CS372H/lab directory, "git pull".
  
• 4/8: Updated lab6 code
  If you have not yet pulled the lab6 code, please disregard. If you have, then please get the update by typing, inside your ~/CS372H/lab directory, "git pull".
  
• 4/6: Final exam: Tuesday, May 18, 2010, 9:00 AM--12:00 PM, ECJ 1.204
  Unfortunately, the schedule is up to the registrar, not us. (We don't like the late final either!)
  
• 4/5: Lab 6 released.
  It is due on Friday, April 23
  
• 4/2: Next Thursday's reading posted
  Sorry for the delay.
  
• 3/28: Office hours schedule this coming week
  
  • 10:00--11:00 AM, Monday, March 29 (NB)
  • 12:00--1:00 PM, Wednesday, March 31 (NB)
  • 2:00--3:00 PM, Friday, April 2 (MW)
  
  
• 3/24: Namrata's Friday office hours 1:00-2:00 PM, in the room just outside of the TA stations in ENS.
  
  
• 3/23: Histogram for midterm exam on first page of solutions
  
  
• 3/23: Namrata's office hours re-scheduled to Friday. Exact time on Friday TBD. More details below.
  Given the lab deadline of this Friday and Mike's being out of town on that day, we are shuffling office hours a bit. This Wednesday, Mike will have office hours from 2:00-3:00. Namrata will not hold office hours at the usual time on Wednesday. This Friday, Namrata will have office hours, and the exact time is TBD.
  
• 3/22: Office hours this Wednesday, not this Friday.
  This week, MW's office hours will be 2:00-3:00 PM Wednesday, not Friday (I'll be out of town on Friday).
  
• 3/22: Updated lab5 code
  If you have not yet pulled the lab5 code, please disregard. If you have, then please get the update by typing, inside your ~/CS372H/lab directory, "git pull".
  
• 3/17: Lab 5 released.
  It is due on Friday, April 9
  
• 3/13: Midterm exam and solutions posted on exams page
  
  
• 3/09: Clarification: the midterm review notes are meant to be helpful, but there is no guarantee that they are necessary or sufficient. In other words, there is no guarantee that everything in them will be on the exam or that everything that is on the exam is in the review notes.
  
  
• 3/09: Notes from midterm review posted on schedule page
  
  
• 3/08: Some tips for reading the Therac-25 paper
  Here are some tips that may save you a bit of time:
  • Whenever they talk about regulatory agencies (such as the FDA): skim those paragraphs.
  • Skip starting at p35 (specifically the paragraph beginning "The second item"), and start reading again on p38 ("Lessons learned").
  • Skip the part on pp40-41 with the header "User and government oversight and standards", and start reading again on p41 with "Most previous accounts".
  
  
• 3/06: No office hours on Monday, March 8. Namrata's office hours instead will be 10:00 AM - 12:00 PM Wednesday, March 10
  
  
• 3/06: Lab T grades and comments posted on eGradebook
  Even if you have not lost points, please check the comments section for pointers.
  
• 3/05: Midterm will be closed book, but you can bring one two-sided sheet of notes
  The formatting requirements on this sheet are as follows: Times New Roman font, minimum 10 point font, minimum 1 inch margins on all sides, maximum 60 lines per side (which is a busy single-spaced sheet), printing on two sides acceptable. If you use handwriting, same deal: your handwriting should be no smaller than 10pt, your margins should be at least 1 inch, etc., etc. As we check IDs, we will check these sheets.
  
• 3/05: Please bring your UT ID to the exam
  
  
• 3/05: Midterm review will be in WEL 3.402, 7:30 PM-9:00 PM, Monday, March 8
  
  
• 3/04: Midterm review tentatively scheduled for 7:30 PM-9:00 PM, Monday
  Classroom and confirmation are pending, but our tentative plan is to hold the review at this time. Most likely, we'll quickly sketch the major units of the course and then spend most of the time answering your questions. Please come with questions about the material.
  
• 3/02: The class notes from today contain a summary of the (now-ended) concurrency unit
  
  
• 3/01: Sample midterms and solutions posted here
  Note, though, that this year's exam may not hew closely to the format of the samples.
  
• 2/28: Updated lab4 code
  If you have not yet pulled the lab4 code, please disregard. If you have, then please get the updates by typing, inside your ~/CS372H/lab directory, "git pull". These updates clarify inconsistent and unclear comments in the code.
  
• 2/26: Reading assignment posted
  The reading assignment for next week is posted on the syllabus page. Note that the assignment involves reading a research paper. Reading papers like this is a skill (and requires time and experience to hone). For now, just take the following approach: read the introduction, then read all of the section headers and figure captions, and then read the conclusion; form an idea of what the paper is about; then go back and actually read the assigned sections. We don't expect all of it to make sense to you, but we expect a lot of it to.
  
• 2/26: Erratum posted
  The handout distributed in class today had a typo. The current posting is fixed. Here's the diff.
  
• 2/24: Office hours next two Wednesdays, not Fridays
  MW's office hours will be 2:00-3:00 Wednesdays (not on Fridays) until spring break (meaning office hours will be on March 3 and March 10). Or send email to set up an appointment outside of office hours.
  
• 2/23: No reading for Thursday; use the time to work through the Sleeping Barber example
  The sleeping barber example is good practice. We won't discuss it in class, but it's a good companion to the readers/writers example that we discussed.
  
• 2/22: Updated lab T Makefile
  If you have not yet cloned the lab T git repository, then you can stop reading. If you have, then please note that there was a bug in the makefile of lab T wherein your submitted code was not being tarred. Thus, you should cd into your ~/CS372H/labt directory and type "git pull". If you have already run "make turnin", you will need to run it again to ensure that the files are actually submitted. Apologies for the inconvenience.
  
• 2/20: Office hours this Wednesday but not this Friday
  MW's office hours rescheduled from this Friday 2:00-3:00 to this Wednesday 2:00-3:00.
  
• 2/19: Lab 4 released.
  
  
• 2/18: Coding with threads....
  In class, we went somewhat quickly over advice and standards for programming with mutexes and condition variables. You need to absorb this material to get full credit on lab T. The class notes contain the material we discussed and other material you probably need for the lab.
  
• 2/18: Cond_signal
  In class, I (MW) said that cond_signal() wakes exactly one thread waiting on a condition variable. In some implementations, cond_signal() could wake at least one thread. On the Linux UTCS machines, pthread_cond_signal() wakes exactly one thread. In general, the documentation (or source code) is the best guide. A related point is that the man pages give lots of helpful information. For example, at some point before finishing the lab, you should type "man pthread_cond_signal" at the Linux UTCS machines.
  
• 2/18: Time dilation in late hours
  Effective at 11:59 PM last night and continuing until Sunday night at 11:59 PM, slack hours are 'running slower' than the clock time. That is, you can use slack hours at an exchange rate of one slack hour for three clock hours until Sunday at 11:59 PM. This would be useful if you did not get all of lab 3A working by the deadline (which might in turn have been because of overly hopeful reading of the overly friendly instructions). After Sunday at 11:59 PM, slack hours will decrement at the same rate as the wall clock in our frame of reference. Note that this one-time slowing may not be as valuable as it might seem because lab 3B will be weighted more heavily than lab 3A (the weightings being given by the corresponding tests in grade.sh that your code needs to pass).
  
• 2/18: Errata in handout for class 9
  The original handout had typos. The current posting is fixed. Here's the diff.
  
• 2/15: Potentially neat opportunity: 3 Day Startup
  Their tag is "3 Day Startup: 40 entrepreneurs, 3 Days, Your Tech Startup!"
  
• 2/13: Updated lab 3 code
  If you have not yet pulled the lab 3 code, please disregard this announcement. If you have, then please get the updates by typing, inside your JOS lab directory, "git fetch && git checkout lab3 && git merge origin/lab3".
  
• 2/13: Updated lab T code
  If you have not yet pulled the lab T code, please disregard this announcement. If you have, please note that we have made two changes: (1) All of the code is now in a git repository, and (2) We changed some of the supplied code to fix some bugs. To migrate from the old .tar file to the git repo, you can use the diff and patch utilities. If you have trouble with this, please let the course staff know.
  
• 2/12: Lab T released.
  
  
• 2/12: Video for threads lecture
  The schedule page lists a video for 02/12, with accompanying handout and notes. The video is assigned viewing before Tuesday's class. The topic is threads.
  
• 2/4: Added short reading section for Tuesday
  As you know, class is canceled for this Tuesday. We have posted a very light reading assignment. We suggest that you use the lighter workload to (1) do lab 2 carefully, reading the source files; and (2) reinforce your understanding of the material by working through the homework exercises.
  
• 2/4: If you're looking for a partner, you may wish to use the course mailing list
  
  
• 2/4: Course mailing list
  We now have a course mailing list. It is cs372h-s10-all@utlists.utexas.edu. Currently subscribed are all students and staff. We subscribed you using whatever email address was listed on our course roster. If you are auditing the course and wish to be added to the mailing list, please send Mike Walfish email.
  
• 2/4: Some exercises posted; please see the "homework" column of the syllabus.
  
  
• 2/4: Lab 3 released.
  
  
• 2/4: Pair programming option available. Deadline for deciding: Friday (February 5).
  If you do not send us email by Friday night, you are coding individually for the rest of the semester. If you exercise the pair option, you are coding in your declared team for the rest of the semester. There is no middle ground, and no opportunity to get back on the "pair track" if you miss the Friday reply deadline. Please read the details of our policy about pair programming on the labs page.
  
• 2/3: Class canceled on Tuesday, Feburary 9
  There will be a taped make-up lecture that will be assigned viewing over the weekend of Feb. 13/14. The assigned readings will be updated after class on Thursday.
  
• 2/2: Updated Thursday's reading assignment; now also includes 3.6 in Tanenbaum
  
  
• 1/29: A potentially helpful Inline Assembly Reference
  
  
• 1/27: For Lab 2
  If you have not yet switched to the lab2 branch, please ignore this. If you have, change to your lab directory and type "git pull"
  
• 1/22: TA office hours are posted
  
  
• 1/21: Office hours on 1/29 and 2/5 rescheduled
  No Friday office hours for MW on 1/29 and 2/5. Instead, they'll be on Monday, 2/1, 3:00-4:00 PM and Thursday, 2/4, 2:00-3:00 PM.
  
• 1/21: Clarification on reading assignments, in general
  Preparing for class means doing the listed assignments before class. Note that the assignment for a given class is listed on the same line as the class.
  
• 1/21: Minor change to labs
  If you have not cloned the git repo yet, you can stop reading. If you have cloned it, change into your lab directory and type "git pull". In addition, if you have created a tracking branch for origin/lab2, type "git pull && git checkout lab2 && git merge origin/lab2"
  
• 1/19: Posted description, policies, labs 1 and 2
  
  

Last updated: Wed May 19 22:58:07 -0500 2010 [validate xhtml]