Introduction

The projects will be organized in similar ways in both courses, though the details of the assignments will differ. In both courses, the following will be required:

• Every student in both classes must have a CCIS account. If you don't have one, get a form, read the directions, set up your account on a Sun machine (or by remote login) and turn in the signed form, in that order. Check to see when your account is activated. You won't get a notification.


• Each student will work in a team, three to four students per team in COM1370 and about three students per team in IS1320. The team makeup and assignments will be put together as follows:
  
  
  1. By Friday midnight, March 28th, you should email the TA and Professor Futrelle the team you want to be on, with one email message per team. Email addresses are on the Information page accessible through the course homepage. If you don't join a team, you will be assigned to one.
  
  
  2. On Monday, March 31st, I will hand out, in class, a list of the teams. You will then confer, in class, to make sure you have the email and/or phone numbers of the other members on your team. (We could do it all by email but you should meet the other members of your team!)
  
  
  3. Each team will come up with a list of five preferred projects, in rank order, from #1 to #5, to be handed in at the beginning of class on Wednesday, April 2nd.
  
  
  4. On Wednesday, April 2nd, a lottery will be held in class to decide which team gets which project. (Delayed until Thursday for IS1320 because of class in Library on the 2nd.)


• All programming projects must be written in Java and will be required to compile and execute correctly on the CCIS Sun Solaris systems, currently running Java 1.4.1. This is the only arrangement that will allow us to grade your work in a uniform and efficient manner. (There are at least 70 students total in the two courses.) Do not develop your code elsewhere and assume it will work without problems on the Sun systems. It is your responsibility to ensure that it does.


• Every student will build project and web directories on the College Sun Solaris system where public reports and private work will be assembled. Details below.


• Every student will be responsible for updating their public reports every week.


• Every team will present a brief oral report during the class period, approximately three presentations during the quarter for each team. The schedule will be handed out immediately after the team assignments are chosen on the 2nd and the presentations begin on the following Monday, April 7th. Presenters should rotate so that, if possible, every team member presents at least once. The presentations will be very short, about five minutes, so they should be carefully rehearsed. It will be impractical to set up students' computers for these brief presentations, so any material you wish displayed should be made available on the CCIS Unix system so it can be presented on Professor Futrelle's machine, either in a browser, or via X11.


• Every student must create separate weekly reports that are linked to a central page in their course web directory. We will pay attention to your English, and if you write sloppily, you will lose some credit. Writing will be important in whatever career you pursue in the future, so pay careful attention to practicing and improving your writing.


• Here are the rules for setting up your course public and private directories in your web space on Unix. (You may keep some of these pages on your own server or ISP if you must, but you run the risk of having your pages unavailable when we are grading your work -- that is your responsibility and your problem.) All Java code must be on the Sun systems so we can execute it.
  
  1. Create a .www directory in your unix home directory; you should already have such a directory. ls -l on the directory should give permissions: drwxr-xr-x, readable and executable by others is the primary point, the rightmost r-x. Use mkdir to create directories.
  
  
  2. In your .www directory create a directory which is either com1370sp2003 or is1320sp2003 (or both, if you're taking both courses ;-( This directory should have the same drwxr-xr-x permissions.
  
  
  3. In this directory, create a pub and a priv directory. The pub directory should have the same drwxr-xr-x permissions as before. For priv directory, restrict the readability using the command:
     chmod go-rw priv
     If you then execute
     ls -ld priv
     you will see the permissions:
     drwx--x--x
     so the directory is executable but not readable.
  
  
  4. cd to the priv directory and do the following relatively secure thing. Create a directory whose name is of the form priv123456 but with a "random" choice for the six digits. (I often use the last six digits of some randomly chosen number from the phonebook to choose such numbers.) If, for example, you choose priv943562 then this is the directory name that you must mail the TA. And you must do this early in Week 2 of the course, the week starting 31 March. The directory can have the usual drwxr-xr-x permissions.
  
  
  5. In your "priv123456" directory (using your digits), create an index.html page that tells us where any of your private pages are and where any subdirectories are that hold any code that you're handing in. Anything that you want only Professor Futrelle and the TA to have access to. This index.html page should be readable by all, e.g., permissions -rw-rw-r--. All code should have indications in it of which students designed, coded, tested and documented which parts of it. You should realize that no one can access your index.html page or any subdirectories, because your "priv123456" directory name is unguessable. This is an adequate enough security system for our purposes. I use it for many private web directories for various research groups on campus that I'm involved with.
  
  
  6. In your pub directory you should place a public index.html page that looks like this. Each week you should add a new link on it to your latest public report, a report that anyone can read. The pages linked to will be in your pub directory or any subdirectories you create.


• The point of all this organization is that there will be a location for your weekly reports that we can monitor (and grade!) and that can be used as part of your in-class presentation. The TA will make up a two pages for her and my use that will have links to the public and private index pages of every student in each class.


• We might find that it's useful to have one of the students in each group set up a public and private group directory and pages. We'll see how that works out as the quarter proceeds. But any such material would only supplement, not replace, individual student pages.

The directions above will be discussed and refined in the first weeks of class.

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