The Internet
& Cornell
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Get into the habit of checking your
e-mail and the course web page daily.
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For e-mail and news, you will need
to have a Cornell NetID and password.
- (Don't confuse your CUID with your NetID. Your CUID is a 6-digit number. Your NetID is a combination of your initials and a number.)
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If you do not have these yet, you need
to go to the CIT helpdesk in the CCC building and obtain a Bear Access
CD.
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For additional help, consult CIT.
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Etiquette
Please observe the following standard e-mail and newsgroup etiquette:
- Be polite. Give unclear writing the benefit of the doubt.
- Use and assume others use a
fixed-width (aka monospaced, aka non-proportional) font
like Courier or Monaco.
- No HTML, MIME encoding, attachments, or binary data unless explicitly solicited.
- Do not change font styles (e.g. bold), text color (e.g. red), font size (e.g. 18 point), or font face (e.g. Palatino): all such changes silently generate HTML!
- Try to avoid TAB stops, and use them only if set at every 8 spaces.
- Quote relevant text from the original message to establish context.
- Interleave new text with quoted text.
That is, add new text after the corresponding quoted text,
not at the very top.
- Delete unrelated quoted text.
- Turn off automatic word-wrapping: break lines by hand.
Formatting is important in programs,
and autowrap tends to screw up formatting.
- Keep lines around 70 characters or fewer in width in text; wider
lines are a little more tolerable in programs.
- Post test messages in cornell.test to avoid cluttering up the course newsgroup.
- [1/24] In general, when you reply to a post, do not send your reply both as e-mail and as a newsgroup post. If you must do both, clearly state so at the start of your reply.
Following these standard guidelines makes your messages friendlier and
more accessible, thus making your questions more likely to be
answered. CIT maintains a
list
of conventions, as well. Other standards are possible and reasonable,
but mixing conventions tends to lead to confusion. Therefore, please
follow the course conventions.
Note 1:The course instructor is likely to ignore e-mail or newsgroup posts that
violate these standards.
Note 2:The course administrator is exempt from the formatting guidelines due to time constraints.
E-mail
CIT supports electronic mail
(e-mail). Follow CS100M Course Etiquette (same as for usenet) when e-mailing staff.
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USENET
(Newsgoups)
USENET provides
an excellent forum for public discussion on the Internet.
The course newsgroup gives students the chance to post their own and
see other students' questions about the technical content of the
course. The CS100M staff closely monitor the newsgroup and try to
offer timely answers.
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(CS100J will use cornell.class.cs100j.)
CS100M will use cornell.class.cs100m.
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Follow CS100M Course Etiquette (same as for e-mail) when posting newsgroup messages.
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Since the news server is sometimes inaccessible, you should save important articles:
e-mail to yourself and/or save to disk.
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Follow all rules of academic integrity!
Never post fragments of your programming-assignment code. Instead,
seek clarification of the underlying concepts, perhaps by pointing
to an example discussed in class.
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We might create new newsgroups if the posting traffic gets too high.
Pitfalls to Avoid
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The course newsgroup is not optional for CS100M,
e.g. a question might provoke an answer that contains significant, new,
relevant material, which is then fair game for exams.
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Newsgroups are not a substitute for going to office hours.
Although simple questions can be answered on a newsgroup, many questions
are best asked in person.
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Newsgroups are not a substitute for reading the course
material. If the answer to a question has already been provided
(e.g. in the write-up for an assignment or posted in reply to another
newsgroup article), the course staff is likely to merely point you in
the correct direction rather than post the answer.
However, if you have found the alleged answer and find it confusing,
then by all means Copy & Paste the relevant passage(s) along with an explanation of what you are confused about and we will clarify.
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Sometimes people have trouble finding replies to questions (both their
own and others). If the posted questions follow proper
Etiquette and are not repeat questions, then the
problem is probably due to inexperience with properly using a good
newsreader or due to using a bad newsreader. A properly configured,
good newsreader makes it easy to spot new posts, and also
threads articles so that each reply is grouped under the
article to which it responds.
Instructions
Refer to CIT's
website or the summary instructions on accessing discussion groups,
below:
On a Windows Platform:
Use WinVN program in CIT labs. Otherwise, try
Netscape:
Start Netscape.
Click on Communicator and select Newsgroups
from the drop down menu. A newsgroup window should appear.
Click on File and select Subscribe. On the
window that appears, make sure the server is newsstand.cit.cornell.edu
If it is something else, click Add Server choose New Server (NNTP)
and then type in the above server name.
In the newsgroups that appear, double click on cornell
and then on cornell.class. Then select the newsgroup cornell.class.cs100m
by double clicking on it followed by OK. You are now subscribed
to the newsgroup.
The messages posted can be seen by double clicking on the
newsgroup title. To post a message, right click on the newsgroup title
and select New Message.
On the Macs in the Carpenter Lab:
Double click on the hard drive icon, followed by Bear
Access and
MT-NewsWatcher.
Double click on MT-NewsWatcher. Select Shared
and create a folder on the desktop.
Type in newsstand.cit.cornell.edu as the news server,
and postoffice.mail.cornell.edu as the mail server.
Fill in the blanks in the window that appears.
After all the newsgroups appear, select cornell followed
by cornell.class
and
cornell.class.cs100m.
In Outlook Express at home over RoadRunner:
Go to Tools-->Accounts-->News-->Add
Enter Name: your name, Email: your e-mail address, NNTP server: newsstand.cit.cornell.edu
Under Properties, click to turn on the choice for "this server requires me to log on"
Enter Account Name: your NetID, Password: your NetID/Kerberos password.
For further
assistance, please ask the consultants in Carpenter Lab or CIT operators in the other public CIT labs.
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WWW
CIT supports viewing
and browsing of the World Wide Web (WWW). Check out the following links
for CS100 websites:
Recent
CS100 Websites
Archived
CS100 websites
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FTP
You can move files between computers
using. File
Transfer Protocol (FTP). We store some CodeWarrior files here.
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