News for UCLA Computer Science 131, Fall 2004

2004-12-02

The project has three more questions and answers.

2004-11-30

The deadline for the project has been put back until this Friday, December 3.

2004-11-29

A typo in the project has been fixed. Previously, the sample output log said "12:38:12". This has been corrected to "12:48:12". Thanks to Brandon Gabbert for this correction.

2004-11-28

• For your convenience test.rpy is also available on the Web.
• The project has several questions and answers at the end, to help clarify it.
• The project has been relaxed slightly as follows: if SYSLOGFILE is not set, your server has the option of behaving as if it named the empty file /dev/null. If you prefer, your server can exit immediately instead (the previously-required behavior).
• The section on suggestions for testing now has a setenv SYSLOGFILE /var/log/syslog line in it.

2004-11-26

Jim Meyering of Lucent reported that the uniq.py implementation referred to in Homework 6 contains some serious bugs possibly leading to loss of data that are due not to uniq.py itself, but rather to bugs in the Python interpreter. Meyering filed this as Debian bug 283108 and it has been escalated to Python bug 1074011, both dated today.

2004-11-19

The project is available. It is due November 30, with a drop-dead date of the last day of class.

2004-11-19

Homework 6 has a third question and answer at the end.

2004-11-18

Homework 6 has two questions and answers at the end, to help clarify the assignment.

2004-11-11

Homework 6 is available. It is due Friday, November 19.

2004-10-29

Homework 5 is available. It is due Friday, November 12.

2004-10-29

• Midterms are this Tuesday and Wednesday.
• Last quarter's Section 1 midterm answers and Section 2 midterm answers are available for your studying pleasure. Not all the questions will make sense to you, since some of them talk about languages and/or homeworks that haven't been used yet this quarter.
• Brandon Gabbert's solution to Homework 1 is available. We thank him for his permission to publish it here.
• Homework 2 has a solution.
• Homework 5's due date has been pushed back to November 8. (It is not available yet.)

2004-10-23

Homework 4 (in Scheme) is available.

2004-10-20

Yesterday's and today's discussions of writing programs for the "world's fastest computer" were obsoleted slightly today by the announcement of the NEC SX-8. NEC reports that this follow-on to the Earth Simulator has a theoretical peak performance of 90 Teraflops. Its Linpack benchmark number has not yet been published, but is expected to best the recently-announced 36.01 Tflops of the IBM Blue Gene/L system (the previous #1), as well as the 35.86 Tflops of the NEC Earth Simulator (the previous #2). For more information, please see NEC's press release.

2004-10-15

• Jason Hickey's introduction to OCaml has been added to the resources. Thanks to Aditya Advani for suggesting Hickey.
• Homework 3 is available.
• The resources Java documentation reference has been upgraded from Java 2 SDK internal version 1.4.2 to version 1.5.0 (external version number 5.0).
• Yesterday Homework 1's Q1 was accepted by the Austin Common Standards Revision Group as an Aardvark objection. You can read the translation of Q1 into standardese in the XRAT Defect reports (2004-10-14) by searching for Enhancement Request Number 6.

2004-10-08

• The submit command should be working now (as of 09:47 today).
• Homework 2 is available.
• The submit command (which worked when we tested it) still seems to have some problems when students use it, since students have not been entered into the SEASnet group database correctly. We will try to get it fixed later today. If it is not working by 17:00 today, we will ask you to email your submissions until it is fixed.

2004-10-07

• Effective Wednesday, October 13, the Lecture 1 section will move to Boelter 5252. The last lecture in PAB 2434 will be Monday, October 11. This does not affect the other lecture section. Also, none of the discussion sections are moving.
• Jason's office hours are Wednesdays 15:30-16:30 and Thursdays 16:30-17:30. Shaorong's office hours are Tuesday and Thursday 09:30-10:30.
• A #use was corrected to # #use in Homework 1. The leading # and space are the prompt; the #use are what you type in.

2004-10-06

A third question and answer has been appended to Homework 1.

2004-10-04

Two questions and answers have been appended to Homework 1.

2004-10-01

A stray instance of valid_command has been corrected to conforming_options in Homework 1. Thanks to Alan Jern for pointing out the error.

2004-09-30

• Homework 1 is available.
• Obtain or renew your SEASnet account right away, as there are occasionally delays before your account is activated.