Announcements

May 4th	Breakout and JAR Files
May 4th	Final Study Guide and Review Sessions
April 20th	Assignment 7 is now posted
April 11th	Review Session for Prelim 2
April 8th	Study Guide for Prelim 2
April 6th	Assignment 6 is now posted
March 6th	Last Minute Change in the Lab
March 20th	Assignment 5 is now posted
March 14th	Prelims Available for Pick-Up
March 14th	Important Matters in Assignment A4
March 1st	Prelim 1 Review in Phillips 101
February 29th	The Handback Room is Upson 360
February 29th	Assignment 4 Instructions Posted
February 13th	Assignment 2 Instructions Posted
January 31st	Typos in the Lab Handout
January 30th	Section Meeting Rooms Changed
January 25th	Section 208 is on Wednesday, not Tuesday
January 20th	No Serial Number/Device ID on your iClicker?
January 20th	Register your iClicker, Even if Used
January 20th	Make Extensions Visible on Your PC

Breakout and JAR Files

Several students have complained about the difficulty in making a JAR file for Breakout. This is because of a slight change that we made in the assignment this year. In the past, students were given all of the ACM files as a folder full of class files. I gave them to you in a (non-double-clickable) JAR file, as that it is easier for DrJava to handle.

However, all those ACM class files need to go into the JAR file with Breakout.class and Brick.class (and anything else you might want). And you cannot put a JAR file inside of another JAR file. Therefore, here is what you need to do.

First, make sure that all of the files you need (Breakout.class, Brick.class, acm.jar, and any images or sound) are all in a single directory. Open up a command line (Terminal on OS X) and use the cd command to navigate to that directory.

The next thing you need to do is to extract all of the class files from acm.jar. Type the command

jar -xvf acm.jar

Now you are ready to put them back (with Breakout.class and Brick.class) into a new JAR file. Assuming that you have made a manifest called manifest.mf, type

jar -cmf manifest.mf *.class acm

If you added any sound files, you should add at the end of the command as well. For example, if all your sounds are WAV files, you can type

jar -cmf manifest.mf *.class acm *.wav

Provided that your manifest file is correct, this should create a double-clickable application.

Posted Friday, May 4th

Final Study Guide and Review Sessions

We have now posted all of the details about the final. You have a study guide, as well as a list of review sessions that you might want to attend. I highly recommend the Monday 3-4 session on the "required algorithms" as that is the most significant new topic on the final.

Posted Friday, May 4th

Assignment 7 is now posted

The very last assignment A7 is up. We hope that you enjoy this assignment. As with the previous assignment, you will find this one a lot better if you get started early and work on it a little bit at a time.

Posted Friday, April 20th

Review Session for Prelim 2

We heard your cries about a review session on Thursday. While neither I nor the TAs could run a review session this weekend, several of the consultants have volunteered to help out. Therefore, the review session is now Saturday at 5pm in Phillips 101.

Posted Wednesday, April 11th

Study Guide for Prelim 2

The study guide for the second prelim is now posted on the exams page. To help you study for this exam, understand that we will model it on previous semesters, but we will replace the question about Abstract Classes with one for Exceptions (and try-catch). The review session is currently begin decided, but it will either be this coming Saturday or Sunday. An announcement will be made in class on Tuesday.

Posted Sunday, April 8th

Assignment 6 is now posted

We have worked very hard to get Assignment 6 formatted for the web and available. It is now up. One thing that you will note is that the instructions are very long. Much of this assignment is just understanding the code. Once you understand it, however, everything except the steganography part (which requires some thought) is straight-forward.

Posted Friday, April 6th

Last Minute Change in the Lab

It became very clear in class that I was not going to finish the material, and the lab I had arranged to give was going to be a disaster. You need one more full lecture before you are ready to take that lab. Therefore, I have removed the lab titled "Loops and Invariants" and replaced it with one called "Reading Files".

If you started the previous lab, hold on to it, but do not finish it. It will be lab 11, for next week.

Posted Tuesday, March 6th

Assignment 5 is now posted

There were some last minute issues with Assignment 5 that we had to fix before posting. Sorry about the delay. It is now available for those who wish to spend break working on it (though this is not required!).

Posted Tuesday, March 20th

Prelims Available for Pick-Up

We have finally put the prelims in the handback room (Upson 360). You may pick them up there whenever you wish.

Posted Wednesday, March 14th

Important Matters in Assignment A4

There has been quite a bit of confusion about two aspects of the assignment (not helped by some contradicting e-mails that we have sent out ourselves). First of all, the originally posted solution was wrong, and it was using wrong ranges for some of the color values. A new a4.jar has been posted and it now gets everything correct. The correct ranges of all the values should be as follows

R, G, B should be between 0 to 255
C, M, Y, K should be between 0 to 100
H should be between 0 to 360
S, V should be between 0 to 1

Any thing else that you might have read that contradicts this should be disregarded.

Second, you should not be using roundTo5 in your conversion programs. The function roundTo5 produces a String, not a number, and is primarily for debugging purposes. It should only appear in your tester and in the appropriate toString methods.

Posted Wednesday, March 14th

Prelim 1 Review in Phillips 101

We finally have a room for the review session for prelim 1. The review will be held in Phillips 101 (your lecture classroom) on Sunday, March 4th from 1:30-3:30. The review session will be led by your TA Yexiang Xue, and will cover sample questions from previous semesters.

Posted Thursday, March 1st

The Handback Room is Upson 360

Your quizes and assignment 2 are available in the "handback room". A number of your have remarked that you are having difficulty finding this room. It is in Upson 360. This is between the undergraduate computing lab (Upson 361) and the room with the glass windows. Find the back entrance to the undergraduate computing lab (not the one with the sign that says Upson 361); look at that back entrance, turn right. That is the handback room.

Posted Wednesday, February 29th

Assignment 4 Instructions Posted

We have posted the instructions for the next assignment. This is a longer assignment, and you are given two weeks to do it. However, do not delay in getting started. You will find that working a little bit on this assignment will help you with the first prelim.

Posted Wednesday, February 29th

Assignment 2 Instructions Posted

We have posted the instructions for the next assignment. This is meant to be a relatively quick written assignment, provided you have been following the lectures. You should be able to do it, while you spend the next week revising Assignment 1.

Posted Monday, February 13th

Typos in the Lab Handout

In editting this week's lab handout, some typos got through and it is causing some confusion on the lab. Many people were getting errors where they should not have (though some errors are intentional!). This has now been fixed online. In general, the online version of anything -- be it lad handouts, assignments, or presentation slides -- is always the most definitive version.

Posted Tuesday, January 31st

Section Meeting Rooms Changed

Because of the mistake in scheduling sections, the ACCEL Labs were mistakenly double booked. We have had to move things about to get us a lab, and not everyone is going to be able to meet in the ACCEL Labs. Only the sections meetings at 12:20 and 1:25 (either day) meet in the ACCEL Labs. The sections meeting at 2:30 and 3:35 are now in Phillips 318.

You are still permitted to go to whichever lab you desire. Furthermore, consultant office hours are still held in the Green Room of the ACCEL Labs; so you should always go to the ACCEL Labs if you are not attending an official lab and want some help.

Posted Monday, January 30th

Section 208 is on Wednesday, not Tuesday

There is a major mistake in the official Cornell course roster. Section 208 was supposed to be a Wednesday section. However, the roster (and student center) have it listed as Tuesday, at the same time as Section 204. In fact, this was one of the things that led to the craziness on Tuesday. As you are allowed to attend any section that you want, this should not be a big deal. However, be aware the TAs will be in the ACCEL lab on Wednesday at 3:35.

Posted Wednesday, January 25th

No Serial Number/Device ID on your iClicker?

The device number, needed to register the clicker, can be recovered by bringing your clicker to (a) the Academic Technology Center Room 123, Computing and Communications Center on the Ag Quad, open 9-5; (b) the ATC's G27 Stimson Hall office near Day Hall, open 12-5; or (c) Walker White's office hours, 4118 Upson Hall, Tuesdays and Thursday 10:10-10:55.

Posted Friday, January 20th

Register your iClicker, Even if Used

To register your device, visit http://atcsupport.cit.cornell.edu/pollsrvc . You will login with your netID and password, and you will need the serial number, or device ID, of your clicker. The device id can be found on the back, , perhaps near a "bar code". You may wish to put some invisible tape over the number or write it down somewhere, since the numbers can rub off.

Note that each individual student in CS1110 needs their own clicker. We will use the clickers in class for the first time on Thursday, January 26. It is important that you have a clicker and register it by that class.

Posted Friday, January 20th

Make Extensions Visible on Your PC

In order to alleviate a lot of confusion regarding Java files, you should fix your PC so that extensions (like .java and .doc) ALWAYS appear. To do this, perform the following steps. First, open an explorer window. Use the menu item Tools and click on Folder Options. Finally, click on the view tab and uncheck the box Hide extensions for known file types.

Posted Friday, January 20th