CSC 148H -- Winter 2003 Course Homepage

For those of you who weren't able to come see me next week, I'll be at UTM in the afternoons on Monday 9th and Tuesday 10th, if you want to come by to pick up your projects, pick up your marked A5, vent about the course, whatever you fancy.

Just to supplement the announcement of my office hours this week, come by in the afternoon if you want to catch me, since I'm usually busy with other duties in the morning.

I'll be coming into UTM on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday of next week. I'm sure that all of you have missed me terribly, or at least you've missed your A5 handins and your projects. There will be an abundance of both next week, so come on in and claim your stuff, or just come in and say hi. After next week I'll probably come in to make myself available for another few days, and then I'll have to figure out where old CSC148 stuff usually goes after the term is over.

The project test cases are up.

Important: read this whole message. All but a few projects are in. You can come to pick them up at my office (SE4041). Please do not email me about your mark until you have picked up your project.

The marks for the assignment were low. Here is what a TA wrote:

              "I keep looking at the rubric and the marking scheme, and asking
              myself why the students are doing so badly, but I can't find
              anything that is unfair. Each column on the rubric in itself
              contains an idea that is trivial."
            

Here is the rubric. You will find a copy of it in your project.

We gave a letter grade on the project. Normally, the university uses this table to do the grade conversion:

            grade   min     max     value
            -----   ---     ---     -----
            A+      90      100     95
            A       85      90      87.5
            A-      80      85      82.5
            B+      77      80      78.5
            B       73      77      75
            B-      70      73      71.5
            C+      67      70      68.5
            C       63      67      65
            C-      60      63      61.5
            D+      57      60      58.5
            D       53      57      55
            D-      50      53      51.5
            F       0       50      17.5
                

We have decided to use the max column instead of the value column. For example, an A+ is worth 100, not 95, and an F is worth 50, not 17.5.

After adjustments, the average for the projects was 65%.

We don't normally do this, but we've typed up some exam solutions and posted them on the Tests page.

"When will the remarks be ready?"... "When will the remarks be ready??"... "When will the remarks be ready???"...

For all those who are wondering, most of the remarks are finally ready. Check to see what changes took place. I know that A1 and A2 have been remarked (except in a few exceptional cases), and I believe that A3 is remarked as well. In any case, they'll all be done soon.

Enjoy!

Thanks to Gary, here are the a5 solutions.

So somebody left their CSC108 and CSC148 notes in the lecture hall after the last Friday class. With the final exam coming up, you'd think that somebody would have asked me about it by now. Oh well.

Anyway, if it's yours, come and get it from me. I'm here today (Thursday) and will be back next Tuesday as well.

We have provided the front page and last three pages of this year's exam on the Tests page.

I'll be at UTM on Tuesday 22nd, Thursday 24th, and most likely Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday of next week.

Question: I feel like I'm really behind. What can I do to catch up?

Answer: First, make a list of the topics that you are having trouble with. Then: look in Big Java (and Program Live). Study the appropriate sections, and do all the exercises you can find. Just look in the indices for the topics in your list.

More: get all the old exams and midterms, and look for questions on the topics. Do the problems, and come ask us questions in office hours!

There are also some online exercises that you can work through: Exercises #1 and Exercises #2.

Here are the JUnit test cases for A4: TestHTMLChecker.java, TestHTMLIterator.java, TestTagIterator.java, and TestURLIterator.java.

I'll be conducting office hours on Tuesday and Thursday this week, for those of you who want to come by. I'll be around in the afternoon for sure, and maybe in the late morning, if I get my act together in time.

I just posted a link to fall 2002's exam on the Tests page, along with a link to the University's webpage of old exams.

I'm sorry for the last-minute notice, but there's very little choice at this point. No extra lecture times are allowed for this course, and lectures after the course is over are explicitly forbidden. And since the final has already been sent in, we can't just let a topic drop.

So Monday's lecture will cover examples of O(..), and how to find runtime formulas from a segment of code. I still have to teach downtown on Monday, so Michelle Craig has been kind enough to teach the lecture for me.

Please spread the word. Remember that contact information I asked you to get at the beginning of the term? Call people, let them know. I have no email list, so I'm trusting you all to make sure your classmates don't miss any lectures.

I'll still be in today, if you still want to visit or ask me questions today. Call before you come, to make sure that I'm there.

In the meantime, why not go on the web and read up a little on big-oh notation between 2 and 3 today, so that you're all ready for class on Wednesday? I think that would be a faboo idea :)

Question: Why did we have to print the project? It's HUGE!

Answer: Four years ago, every assignment in 108 and 148 was submitted on paper. Three years ago, we switched to electronic submission, and had a TA print everything for every assignment. That was always a full day of work, and sometimes two full days: handling printer failures, fixing bad files, and so on. Paying a TA to babysit a printer is a waste of your money.

This year, almost every assignment (on St. George and UTM) was submitted electronically and marked electronically. Over the summer, a student and I wrote a program to allow the TAs to mark electronically. (That's different form automarking: automarking is entirely automatic, and TA electronic marking has the TA insert marking comments into the code and discuss style, design, and so on.)

So we've saved tons of trees this year. But we also believe that it's important to see on paper (and organize) some of the work you've produced, which is one of the reasons why we had you print the project.

Here's a financial reason: when marking a dozen classes, it REALLY helps to be able to lay them out on paper on your desk so that you can see a lot of information at once and quickly jump back and forth. Marking the project electronically would, quite literally, double the marking time. And we don't get enough money from the university to hire more TAs to do that marking.

And last: I think it's amazing how much code you produce during a term. You don't really get the feeling for it until you hold the paper in your hand and leaf through it.

---

Many of you will see "Compile Failed" in the top bit 
of the A4 automarking, and you'll also see this error 
in the A4 test case results details:

   java.lang.Exception: java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: HTMLIterator

It turns out (and we're surprised too) that if you 
implement Iterator like this:

  public class HTMLIterator implements Iterator {

    public String next() {     <-- Return type String
      :
    }
    // other methods omitted
  }

Then it will compile fine in DrJava. But the correct 
signature for next is this:

    public Object next()

The first one *shouldn't* compile; this is a DrJava bug."

---

---

To help you with your programming style, we have run 
CheckStyle on your A4 code. Here is the URL:

  http://checkstyle.sourceforge.net/

CheckStyle is, as you might guess, a style-checking program.

So that you don't worry: we are going to ignore most 
results for the A4 marking. We will only be paying 
particular attention to the 80-character-line rule, 
the 40-line-method rule, and the Javadoc-every-member 
rule. Violating the first will be worth about a 3% 
deduction (only applied once). If you grossly violate 
the 40-line limit we'll apply about a 1% deduction. If 
you miss several Javadoc method comments that will be 
worth another 3% or so.

The rest of the lines below are just for feedback. For 
example, whitespace issues are flagged:

  (String)s

should be written as this:

  (String) s

Notice the space after the cast. A resulting CheckStyle 
line might be

  HTMLChecker.java:63:31: 'cast' is not followed by whitespace.

That says that the problem was on line 63 of HTMLChecker.java, 
character 31.

It may seem picky, but professional programmers follow 
these guidelines, and your code will almost always look 
a LOT better if you follow them, too.

You may notice CheckStyle complaining about your brace 
placement. If you are used to placing braces on lines by 
themselves (for example, it is the standard for UTM students), 
feel free to ignore those particular warnings.

CheckStyle is configurable. We have run it using Sun 
Microsystems' recommended style, which is described in 
these documents:

   the Java Language Specification at
   http://java.sun.com/docs/books/jls/second_edition/html/index.html

   the Sun Code Conventions at
   http://java.sun.com/docs/codeconv/

   the Javadoc guidelines at
   http://java.sun.com/j2se/javadoc/writingdoccomments/index.html

   the JDK Api documentation
   http://java.sun.com/j2se/docs/api/index.html

---

The electronic submission still needs to be done by 9am.

Please put the printouts in an envelope, and attach a cover page. Assignments that have been stapled to the envelope will not be marked: attach the cover page, and THEN put the printouts in. You may need an envelope larger than 8.5" x 11", there are a lot of pages!

Assignments that do not have a cover page will not be marked.

Drop the envelope in the 148 drop box in the computer lab in room SE2045. We'll clear the drop boxes at these times:

              9am Monday (9am sharp please, not 9:10)
              noon Monday (considered 3 hours late)
              4pm Monday (considered 7 hours late)
              9am Tuesday (considered 24 hours late)
              noon Tuesday (considered 27 hours late)
              5pm Tuesday (considered 32 hours late)
            

Happy St. Patrick's Day, by the way :)

Here is the test case program, A2TestCases.java. Geoff has written instructions for how to set up and run test cases.

Here are the A2 test cases again. There are 3 files for each test case: an HTML file, the list of tags in that file, and the list of link tags in that file. You can download Stuffit Expander if your computer doesn't have a program to unzip and untar that file.

To sign up a partner, submit a plain-text file called partners.txt containing the two login names, one per line. If you want to work on your own, (did I mention that this isn't a good idea?) submit the file with just your login name.

Here are sample contents:

Burr_Tim
Oshay_Rick
	    

The final deadline for signing up with a partner will be Friday, March 20th at noon.

If you're looking for a way to reduce line usage, consider the following. Instead of:

if (blah)
{
String s = br.readLine();
foo(s);
}


try:

if (blah) {
foo(br.readLine());
}


• If you want to test posting to a newsgroup, please don't test with ut.cdf.csc148h. Instead, test with the CDF test newsgroup.
• We have removed the link to send email to the newsgroup. The sysadmins have changed the way the newsgroup is accessed, and the email link should no longer be necessary. (And only worked from computers on the downtown campus.)

• to return marks that were lost because of wording errors in the assignment that caused confusion
• to adjust marks for people who misinterpreted the assignment description in a small, subtle way that lost many marks (i.e. prompts to the screen, extra spaces in the HTML output).

• to get back marks due to programming error (Note: interpretation error != implementation error)
• to fix things that there wasn't time to fix before the due date
• to fix silly mistakes.

In A1, several of you created many BufferedReader objects for the keyboard, which can cause unexpected crashes. (If you passed many of the test cases then you didn't have this problem.) If you did have this problem, then to test whether you fixed it right then download the A1 test cases, start up a command prompt, and run your program like this:

              java A3Driver < 1.dat
            

That tells Java to take input from file 1.dat rather than from the keyboard, and it will crash if you have more than one BufferedReader for System.in. You should try it for several of the test cases, of course.

Many of you seem to be finding the newsgroup useful. That's great! (See the Contact Info page for how to use it.) If you want to use it, please do the following:

• Turn off MIME and HTML in your newsreader.
• Include your full name in your posts. We won't answer anonymous posts.
• Provide a good Subject (such as "A3: what to store in Nodes?"). This helps other students with the same question find the answer.
• Search through the Subjects to see if your question has already been answered. (If 800+ student use the newsgroup without doing this, the newsgroup rapidly becomes unusable, and we'll stop answering questions.)
• Collect several questions together into a single post. Don't post them individually, that REALLY clutters the newsgroup.

It looks like roughly 1 out of every 6 or 7 A1 programs printed prompts, misunderstood what "0-based" meant, or did something other simple mistake that caused almost every test case to fail. That's actually good: that means that 85% of you followed the instructions!

If you did make a small mistake like that, and you figure out exactly how to fix it, we'll be happy to give most of the marks back: please fill out a Remark Request form and give it to your instructor. Be sure to tell us exactly what needs to change --line numbers are helpful-- in order to get your code to work. (Just so you know, it may take several weeks to process them; remarks always take time.)

Please hand in your envelope containing A2 part I into the CSC148 drop box at SE 2045.

As you know, the due time is 9am Monday. However, we will not collect the A2 part I's from the drop box until 1pm, so as long as you hand in your part I before Monday at 1pm, it will not be considered as late.

We will also collect them at various intervals on Monday and Tuesday after the Monday 1pm deadline. If you submit it late, you will be penalized based on which interval you fall into. Do me a favour though. Submit it on time.

Part II still has the regular 9am deadline.

Question: I didn't do all that well in CSC108/107, and I still have trouble with object-oriented programming. What can I do to make sure I'm better prepared for CSC148?

Answer: Work on these old assignments to get back into practice with object-oriented concepts. (If it's loops an arrays that bug you, try later assignments.)

• Practice assignment 1
• Practice assignment 2
• Practice assignment 3, plus starter code: CoffeeKlatsch.java, CoffeeCup.java, and CoffeeMachine.java

Send email to CSC148H.