CSC104 Important Announcements

Please check this page frequently for important announcements. It is your responsibility to check this page regularly.

• (00/08/18) I will be away on holidays until September 5th. Please feel free to contact me by e-mail when I return. It was a pleasure teaching you, and I wish you all the best with the rest of your studies!
  
  
• (00/08/17) Your non-official final marks are now available on the course web page. It is important that you realize that these marks are only tentative, and the faculty reserves the right to modify or withhold them if they please. Please check ROSI to determine your official mark in this course.
  
  
• (00/08/10) I have now added 0.4 to all A4 marks for Biljana and Petra's sections (check the web page to verify your mark). As mentioned below, no adjustments will be made to the A4 marks for Fred's section. For Sid's section, I added 0.4 marks to all students, except for 5, as the deduction had not been made to these assignments.
  
  
• (00/08/08) I have decided that I will bring all unclaimed assignments with me to the final examination room. If you finish your exam early and want to pick up your assignment, please do so QUIETLY so that you don't disturb those who are still writing. If there is an error with the marking of your A4 (besides the error in Part 1b #8), please bring the assignment to me on Tuesday August 15th (from 2-4 p.m and 6-8 p.m.) and I will remark it. This will be your last chance to have assignments remarked.
  
  
• (00/08/08) Please note that all student's in Petra and Biljana's sections and some students in Sid's section will have lost 0.4 marks for the question in Part 1b #8 of assignment 4 (The answer should have been AER=8, THU=10, STI=0, CHI=3). This was due to an error in the answer key. I will be adding 0.4 marks to the assignments that lost these marks, so please do not bring your assignment to me to be remarked if you lost these marks. I will post an announcement to let you know when I've added these marks.

  Fred realized that there was a problem with the marking key and did not deduct these marks, so that is why students in Fred's section will not receive these marks back. Towards the end of marking, Sid realized the problem, and this is why only some students in Sid's section will be given back the 0.4 mark.
  
  

• (00/08/07) Unclaimed assignments can be picked up from my office on Tuesday August 8th (3-7 p.m.), and on Tuesday August 15th (from 2-4 p.m and from 6-8 p.m.). I will also bring them to the final examination room. All assignment remarks must be given to me on August 15th, otherwise I will not be able to reflect the mark change in your final mark. Please remember that the mark for a remarked assignment may go up or down, so only submit assignments that definitely have an error in the marking.

  After August 15th, I will leave all unclaimed assignments in the CSSU office (1st floor in the Engineering Annex building). The CSSU office does not have regular hours during the summer, so it will be hard for you to know when you can pick up your assignments from here (unless you wait until the fall term starts in September).
  
  

• (00/08/07) Since you do not have a tutorial this week, I'll extend my office hours to be from 3:30 p.m. until 7:00 p.m. on Tuesday August 8th. I may need to leave briefly (15 minutes) during that time period, but I will leave a note on the door saying when I'll be back.
  
  
• (00/07/26) The problems with the MS Access wizards on the computers in the lab have now been fixed.
  
  
• (00/07/18) I will provide links to any general questions that I answer about Assignment 4 here. Question one, two.
  
  
• (00/07/18) MS Access will be made available in the lab tomorrow (July 19th).
  
  
• (00/07/10) I will provide links to any general questions that I answer about Assignment 3 here. Question one, two, three, four, five.
  
  
• (00/07/07) I have recently added the description for assignment 4 to the course web site. I have also scheduled extra TA office hours for A4. Please see the TA office hour schedule at the bottom of the People web page. A4 will take a fair amount of time, so do not leave it to the last minute.
  
  
• (00/07/07) Please visit me during my office hours if you'd like to take a look at a copy of the midterm exam that has the correct answers circled.
  
  
• (00/07/07) The midterm marks are now available on the course web site. I've raised all midterm marks by 6% to bring the average up to 64.5%. See the "MTAj" (adjusted midterm mark) that is reported for you on the marks web page. I would not worry too much if your midterm mark is low, as the higher assignment marks should make up for the lower midterm marks. As I mentioned earlier, I will also scale the final marks in the course if the average is too low.
  
  
• (00/07/04) This is a reminder that we will be watching a video during the lecture next week. If you miss the video, you can view it on your own in the AV library. See the Lectures web page for more information.
  
  
• (00/06/30) There will be no TA office hour on Monday July 3rd, due to the Canada day weekend. I have moved this TA office hour to Wednesday July 24th at 4-5 p.m. I felt that you may need extra help at this time because it is the week before A4 is due. See the complete TA office hour schedule on the course web page (available from the "People" link).
  
  
• (00/06/28) I've added more detailed information about the breakdown of questions on the midterm to the Exams web page.
  
  
• (00/06/26) The software at CDF-PC will be switched from MS Visual Basic 5.0 to MS Office 97 on Tuesday July 4th. The computers with the larger hard drives, will have both software packages installed all term.
  
  
• (00/06/23) One day extension for A2. Because this is the hardest assignment in this course, I've decided to give you a one day extension. You may either submit A2 during your tutorial on Tuesday June 27th as usual or you may submit it without penalty to the late drop box (just outside room SF2305A) by 11:30 p.m. on Wed. June 28th. You will lose 30% if you submit your assignment to the late drop box by 9:00 p.m. on Thursday June 29th. (Note: the Sandford Fleming building is locked at 9:30 p.m. on weekdays.) You are encouraged to hand in your assignment early so that you will have plenty of time to study for the midterm test, which will take place on Tuesday July 4th, at 6:00 p.m.
  
  
• (00/06/22) Any corrections for the course package will be added to the course package corrections web page. Please make sure that you've made all corrections to your copy of the course package.
  
  
• (00/06/21) I'll add links to questions that I've answered about assignment 2 here. Question one, two. (On 00/06/22, I added a longer explanation for the functions that you have to write, so you might want to read question one again.)
  
  
• (00/06/21) I've just posted a new version of the starter code for A2 that has one main change. It adds the statement Option Explicit to the (General)(Declarations) section of the program and it adds variable declarations for all for loop counters. By adding "Option Explicit", this means that all variables must be explicitly declared. This helps to eliminate problems associated with spelling variable names wrong. If you have already downloaded the assignment, you do not need to download it again. If you haven't started yet, you might want to download this newer version instead.
  
  
• (00/06/21) All marks for assignment 1 are now available on the marks web page. Please check your marks, and let me know if your mark has not been recorded correctly.
  
  
• (00/06/20) I've added more office hours for this week. I'll hold office hours from 2-4 p.m. on Friday June 23rd in my office (room SF2302D). Bring your A2 questions!
  
  
• (00/06/20) If your program is not responding, it may be in an infinite loop (the condition for the loop never becomes true, so the loop executes forever). The simplest way to stop your program (without typing CTRL+ALT+DEL and going to the task manager to shut down the task), is to press CTRL+BREAK. This will take you back into your program and show you which line of code was executed last.
  
  
• (00/06/19) A student wrote, I have finished by Dec2Bin. It works when I input 9 digits number like "999999999". However, when I input more than 9 digits, for example 10 digits, "9999999999", it doesn't work. How can I fix it? My answer is... You do not have to worry about this limitation. Since the largest number that can be stored in a Long is 2147483647, your program does not need to work for numbers that are larger than this.
  
  
• (00/06/13) You are not responsible for all of the material covered in the last set of Visual Basic lecture notes (the part called "Visual Basic 3" or "Lec8" in the course package). We'll skip pages Lec8-12 through Lec8-18.
  
  
• (00/06/13) The last two functions that you need to write for Assignment 2 can be greatly simplified by calling two of the other functions that you wrote for this assignment. I'll discuss this in more detail in the next lecture.
  
  
• (00/06/13) For assignment 2, you are not allowed to use the Visual Basic built-in functions that convert between the different number bases. For example, you cannot use the built-in "Oct" function.
  
  
• (00/06/12) I've ordered more copies of the "Essentials of VB6 Programming" optional VB text book. They'll be available in the book store by Thursday or Friday of this week.
  
  
• (00/06/12) Here is some information that you should read if you're planning to use Visual Basic from home.
  
  
• (00/06/09) Assignment #2 is now available on the course web page. Also included are three files containing code that we have given you. You'll need to download these three files to your hard drive. Based on past experience, Visual Basic is the area of the course that most students have had the most trouble with. It is very important that you attend all tutorials and lectures, and that you get to the lab early to learn the Visual Basic environment and to try out the examples that the TAs cover in the tutorials. Take advantage of the TA office hours.
  
  
• (00/06/09) In case you missed the announcements that were made in the last couple of lectures. There was a correction to page 4 of 14 in the Number Systems section of the course package. The number should be 735 instead of 737. Even if you did not order a course package, I did order a few extras, so you can still get one from me during my office hours.
  
  
• (00/06/06) If you have followed all of the directions to copy your files to the H:\public_html folder, but are still unable to view your A1 files on the web page, you might find these instructions from Petra helpful.
  
  
• (00/05/30) Here is some information about how to print and how to open existing files using Notepad.
  
  
• (00/05/30) I received e-mail from a few students who were unable to pickup their course package in my office hours today. I will be in my office between 4-5 p.m. on Thursday June 1st, so please stop by to pick up your course package at that time. You can also pick it up any Tuesday during my office hours. I'm really sorry that I incorrectly wrote the wrong room for my office on the overhead that I presented to the day section today ... I hope you were able to figure out that my office is really SF2302D! If anyone needs extra HTML help, you could also stop by my office between 4-5 p.m. on Thursday June 1st.
  
  
• (00/05/29) If you are having any problems in the course (related to the lecture material or to HTML), please feel free to visit me during my office hours (4-6 p.m. on Tuesday in SF2302D). Also please stop by my office hours to pick up your course package this week.
  
  
• (00/05/29) Here are e-mail messages that I've answered for students about assignment 1: Message one, message two, and message three.
  
  
• (00/05/18) Assignment #1 is now available on the course web page. Please print out a copy for yourself. Don't forget to print the cover page too.
  
  
• (00/05/18) The course packages will be available for pickup in my office on Friday May 26th, from 5:30-6:30 p.m. If you cannot pick it up at this time, you can pick it up during my office hours on Tuesday May 29th. We will be placing the order for the course packages next Tuesday May 23rd, so if you haven't ordered your copy yet, you'll have another chance after the lecture on Tuesday May 23rd. Please leave a downpayment, and I will order a copy for you.

  If you were not at the first lecture, here is some information about the course package. It will be about 200 pages long and the cost is $30. It contains all lecture slides that will be presented in the course (4 slides per page), as well as supplementary material about Number Systems, HTML, Visual Basic, an essay on Computers in Society, and a sample midterm from the Fall 1999 course that I taught.
  
  

• (00/05/18) If you missed the first lecture, please note that tutorials will start during the second week of classes. The course outline indicates which tutorial session you have been assigned to.
  
  
• (00/05/18) The TAs for some of the tutorial sections have changed. Please consult the course outline on the course web page to see who is your tutor. The course web page will always contain the most up-to-date version of the course outline.