March 14, 2005
Kawika Heftel, live in concert on April 16!
Kawika Heftel has a gig lined up at Sweet's barbequeue on April 16. That's in Provo kind of by the DI and hospital dow n at the end of Bulldog Avenue. There's a $2.00 cover charge, which is a lot less than its going to cost to hear Kawika live after he gets famous. See the freedb for a list of songs on Kawika's CD
Posted by jones at 03:46 PM | Comments (0)
March 09, 2005
BYU iOscars 2005
Quinn Taylor passed this contest along to me. Some of you more artsy people might have a shot at winning this... [BYU iOscars '05 :: Make a movie, win an iPod!]
Posted by jones at 02:47 PM | Comments (0)
February 25, 2005
Grades and the gradebook
I got a little behind on grading, but I am close to being caught up. Here's the scoop: crossing the desert is completely graded, but there were problems getting it into blackboard. It will be online soon, meanwhile you can send mail to the TAs at cs312ta@gmail.com to get your grade.
Homework upto recurrence relations is graded and entered. Send the TA's mail if you are missing a grade.
I've graded all of the phylo improvement papers that I got. Grades will be posted soon. I didn't get very many papers, only like 4. If you don't have a grade for that by next wednesday, send me your report, tell me when you finished it and i"ll grade it.
Phylo project will be graded soon.
Posted by jones at 01:58 PM | Comments (1)
February 14, 2005
Phylo Project Important Information
We have disovered 3 things that you will want to be aware of while working on your phylogenetics projects:
- The example dot files have a spurious "}" character midway in the files. You will want to ignore this extra closing curly brace. You can also do many more things to format your dot file to better meet your needs. The GraphViz website has a lot of good documentation.
- Problem 3 has an extra taxa that need to be deleted for the tree to make sense. The bad taxa is taxa number 8. You can download a new database here or you can delete the taxa from your current database. You need to copy the downloaded database over your existing database in your project distribution directory. To delete the taxa from your current database, you need to first have Microsoft Access installed on your machine.
- Open the phylo.mdb file located in the project distribution using Access
- Select the "tables" option in the viewer
- Open the tTaxa table
- Find the node 8 taxa for problem 3
- Right-click and choose delete record
- The current viewer only passes taxa sequences of 9 characters to your UnrootedTree:defineTaxa function rather than 10 character sequences as in the database. This is fine! Just work on 9 character sequences rather than 10.
Posted by egm at 09:39 AM | Comments (0)
February 05, 2005
New webpage layout
As you can see, I've redesigned the webpage. I hope its easier to find things. Let me know what you think of this one. By the way, this version was created based on a comment from Prajwol.
Posted by jones at 08:38 PM | Comments (0)
January 27, 2005
Online access to C# and .net reference books
[Safari Books Online] It turns out that our library has a subscription to an online technical book service. It turns out that it includes almost all of the O'Reilly books. While O'Reilly is most famous for its unix-y technical books, O'Reilly also has a slew of books on C# and .net programming.
So you can get access to a bunch of C# and .net programming reference books for free. And that's a good thing.
If you are accessing from off-campus then you will have to type in your RouteY information to get access.
Here's a note from John Christensen at the library that gives more details about this and other collections available online:
"I am covering Computer Science this year for the library while we try to hire a new librarian over that area since our last one left. I teach classes about library use which include computer science students and I asked some of them today how to get the word out about a computer science resource the library has. They suggested that I contact the faculty and ask you to get the information out through announcements in classes as well as an announcement on the CS webpage. The resource I am referring to is the Safari collection of computer science books that the library subscribes to. You may or may not be familiar with the Safari collection. You can view it at: http://proquest.safaribooksonline.com/?uicode=byuprovo We have a partial subscription to Safari. Our subscription includes all the O’Reilly books in the collection. They represent about 1/5 of the collection and we are doing this as a trial. I have been told by the library automations people over here that O’Reilly is probably the premier publisher and there are a number of our automations people that have had personal subscriptions to Safari before the library started their subscription.
The CS students I talked to all said that if they had known about Safari they would have used it a lot and will now be trying it out. As you can see from the webpage from Safari, it is the full text of the books and they are indexed so you can search for answers to questions within the books and then go right to the material to answer those questions. Could you let students know about Safari in your classes? I have sent a similar email to your CS Webmaster also asking for his help in spreading the word. Students can get to it on the BYU library webpage by going to “Search by Discipline,” then “Physical and Mathematical Sciences,” then “Computer Science.” On our Computer Science page it is the last item at the bottom of the page. It is available off-campus. If you are off-campus and connect you will get a page asking for your Y-Net information and when you input that information you will be allowed into Safari just as though you were on campus."
Posted by jones at 10:39 AM | Comments (0)
January 14, 2005
We will do 312 in C#
Based on feedback and discussion, we have decided to do 312 in C# this year. The first project is designed for you to write a C++ dll for an application (because we needed to get the project designed before the C# decision). The remaining projects will require you to use C#.
I put a little link to learning C# at google for your convenience.
[Google Search: learning C# ]
Posted by jones at 01:23 PM | Comments (0)
January 12, 2005
Devotional Thoughts
[For the Strength of Youth (pdf)] We will have a thought from For the Strength of Youth each Wednesday after a devotional or forum. The person giving the thought will select a paragraph or less from For the Strength of Youth and say how its related to the devotional or forum. This should take 2-3 minutes. If you missed the devotional or forum, you can find a summary in the Religion Section of NewsNet or the Campus Section.
Mail me if you don't want to give one of these thoughts and I won't ask you to. Otherwise, you are fair game!
Posted by jones at 02:41 PM | Comments (0)
December 31, 2004
Welcome to the CS 312 website
This is the website for CS 312, section 003 only, it will be used for everything except grades. Grades will be kept in blackboard. 312 is a fun introduction to algorithm analysis. We will analyze algorithms in terms of performance and correctness. We will look at performance from both a theoretical and an emperical perspective. For many 312 students, the projects in 312 are their first exposure to the problem of making a program "go fast" rather than just making it work enough to pass off.
This version of 312 will require the use of Microsoft VisualStudio .net. I firmly believe that the Microsoft development platform is under-represented in our classes. The overwhelming majority of you that end up in software development careers will use Microsoft tools all day, every day. Unfortunately, the majority of our graduates have little or no experience with these tools. Of course, a good CS graduate can pick it up in a matter of days or weeks--it is just a development environment after all. You will not become a VisualStudio expert at the end of 312, but you will get a glipse of what you can do with these tools and see that is it indeed just another development enviornment with its own strengths and weaknesses.
VisualStudio is installed in our windows labs in the CS department (which, as you may have noticed, are eerily quiet most of the time). I will post details on how to obtain a free copy of VisualStudio .net soon...
Posted by jones at 03:06 PM | Comments (0)