Announcements

Tuesday, December 7

The end of the semester is upon us. Your projects and IFE assignments are due at the end of this week. I am going to make a slight modification to the turn-in procedure. Recall that I originally said that your projects should be placed in http://www.cs.montana.edu/~name/cs518. I haven’t been able to find any projects directly there so far, and some are using this for as a general web site for 518 (which is an obvious thing to do). So, l am asking you to do the following.

  1. Put your project in http://www.cs.montana.edu/~name/cs518/project
  2. Put your group IFE/startup paper in http://www.cs.montana.edu/~name/cs518/ife
  3. E-mail me your project as well, so that I can put it into the short stories part of the class web.
  4. Be sure your permissions are set so that we can all read your project and ife paper.

I have been debating about what to do for a final in this class but have finally decided that I will give an oral final. There are enough people in the class that this approach makes the time a bit tight. However, there are good reasons for giving an oral exam. One is that it will give you practice for your Master’s or PhD oral. Another is that if you start down a wrong avenue or get stumped, I can steer you back onto the right path and/or give hints to jump start your answers (this is exactly what happens in an MS or PhD oral exam…our interest in these exams is to see how well you respond to questions, not to just let you go blindly down a wrong path).

Actually testing and assigning final grades are undoubtedly the least pleasant aspects of an otherwise rewarding profession. But we have to do it. So rather than just do this as a matter of course, I try to think of ways to make the exams part of your learning experience.

FAQ.

When will the oral be held?

Obviously, this cannot be a group oral, so each person needs individually to schedule about 30-45 minutes with me during finals week.

Where will the oral be held?

Wherever we can find a white board free. This will be determined at the time of the oral.

What kinds of questions are you going to ask?

Hard ones. ...actually, questions asked of you will be of a couple of varieties. Some will be of the usual type (e.g., “explain the instruction fetch and execute cycle,” or “what is a context switch and what has to happen during a context switch?”). Others will be questions to see that you learned from your own presentation, and yet others will be to see what you learned from the presentations of others. Finally there might be a question or two on something we didn’t even talk about, perhaps a hypothetical situation, to see how you can extend your understanding of hardware and operating systems to deal with a new issue.

Will each person get exactly the same set of questions?

No.

So, can I tell my buddies what questions you asked me?

No.

Can I feed people misinformation about what questions you asked in an attempt to ensure that I do better than them?

That wouldn’t be very nice.

Will my whole grade be based on my miserable oral performance?

No. Actually a grade should indicate both how much you learned and your capacity for learning. I will be factoring in how you did on assignments, how well you contributed in class, and on your project--the form and content of the presentation as well as the final version you turn in for the short stories portion of the web site. The oral will give you an opportunity to demonstrate the breadth and depth of your knowledge and how well you can use that knowledge to answer new questions.

Oral exams scare me.

They should.

Please send any other questions you might have so that I can post them on the web site on this announcements page.

 

Thursday, November 18

I have heard no complaints about the Monday, November 22, schedule given in the Monday, November 15 announcement below, so we will stick with that schedule.

I have posted a clarification to your project assignments on the assignments page.  Take a look at it. 

I want to reiterate that you need to provide reading assignments and a link to your presentation a few days before your presentation.  Do this on the CS 518 forum at http://www.cs.montana.edu/forum.

I also want to reiterate that you need to come to the presentations prepared by having put some conscientious work into looking at the reading references and talk provided by presenters.

Monday, November 15

I have posted a brief summary of the user/supervisor modes with respect to UNIX and the Intel architecture on the announcements page.

Since I (and I suspect others) will be absent on Wednesday, November 24, just before Thanksgiving day, I would like to suggest that we meet on Monday 22 at 4:10 pm in the same room (as well as our usual meeting time).  Hopefully that will not be too burdensome to the RIghtNow folks.  Because of a conflict, Gaurav would like to go at that time, giving up his time for Debzani to finish her presentation on Monday, November 22.

Wednesday, November 10

After Bosky's presentation today I made a few assignments, which I will recap here:

  1. Read about the classic "Readers-Writers" problem in your undergraduate OS textbook
  2. Read about the classic "Bounded Buffer" problem in your undergraduate OS textbook
  3. Read about semaphores in your undergraduate OS textbook.
  4. Read about Modules in Linux

A few notes on Bosky's presentation.

  1. Her use of PowerPoint was really quite good.  She used animation to advantage and had her talk well organized around the slides she presented.
  2. Her talk was well prepared and organized in that she knew where she was at each step and where she was going.
  3. Her use of code examples was noteworthy in that she had cut just the pieces that she needed to talk about from the body of the Linux source and had already highlighted the code lines she wanted to display.
  4. She had good, short programming examples to illustrate her points.

Notice that all of this takes quite a bit of effort, but it does lead to a nice presentation.

Time was again an issue, although she was close.

Monday, Nobember 8

A couple of other comments about presentations after Fuad's today:
 

  1. Fuad's use of PowerPoint slides was a good example of how a talk can be enhanced with good slides.  The animations (e.g., showing data flow) just add enough more information to help a talk along.
  2. Until you've actually done one, it is hard to anticipate how long will be needed for a talk.  As Fuad himself noted, this presentation was just too long for the allotted time.  This is precisely the trap I have mentioned a few times now:  you have a very good and interesting topic, there are many points we would all like to learn, to understand it well, it appears that all of these points should be covered, and, sadly, you only have 50 minutes in which to do the presentation.

So what does one do about point 2?  Two things.  (1) Cut.  This is always quite difficult.  You have to decide what should be the most important focus of your talk and be sure that that point is well covered.  If there happens to be time left over, you can fill in gaps at the end.   (2) post on the web important things for the audience to read in preparation for the talk and even say, "I'm not going to be able to cover part x, but if you read this you will understand it, so I won't have to cover it."

Finally, this posting should not be construed as a poor review of Fuad's presentation.  He obviously did a lot of work, organized his talk well, and was ready for a good presentation.  This is just part of the ongoing discussion on crafting a presentation.

Thursday, November 4

Check out this link for preparing your presentation.

Monday, November 1

The Friday, October 29, announcement below is bogus.  I meant to post it to the CS 510 web site.

Friday, October 29

If you would like to have a copy of your exam as you make any desired adjustments, please let me know.

Monday, October 18

The schedule has changed a bit already (see the posting below).  Please recheck it.  There are still opportunities to rearrange the schedule.

Sunday, October 17

I have posted a tentative schedule of project presentations on the Lectures page.  Please look at it.  There is plenty of opportunity to switch dates at this juncture.  Also, I will need each of you to verify your project.  If I have posted a project in error, please let me know.

Friday, October 15

As stated in the e-mail sent to everyone on Thursday, October 14, the 518 class will be cancelled today to allow all students to attend the seminar in our classroom, EPS 108, at 3:10.

As a second note, please be sure that you are reading e-mail sent to your cs account.  We (as a department) expect that we can get in touch with every student at this address.  If you prefer to read your e-mail at a different address simply include a .forward file in the root directory of your account with the forwarding address.

Wednesday, September 29

Hi everyone,

If you haven’t already done so, please announce the local programming contest (to be held this Saturday) in your classes today and tomorrow.

http://www.cs.montana.edu/paxton/contest/local.html

Thanks.

Cheers, John

Monday, September 13-2

It appears that we have some problems with the Linux boxes in 259.  Please read.

It appears that "clint's computer in the advanced operating class got hacked, or was misconfigured. It was iteratively working it's way through the address space and cloning a number of 199 addresses.

I have confiscated the computer and will be doing forensics on it.

This leads me to 2 assumptions.

1.) These computers need to be better secured. 2.) I need to force security on the users.

We should force all the users to use the exact same Linux, and configure the Linux, and firewall on the systems. Or at least install a Linux version that does not have any remote exploits on it, and is patched daily.

The systems should also be configured so I have remote admin access so I can check the systems to verify they are correctly secured.

We could also firewall that room off.

I will have more detail shortly when I do forensics on the box.

--Luke

Monday, September 13-1

Please check the Rogue's Gallery (link on home page).  Make sure that I have the correct names with the correct faces.  Also, if you have a first name that you prefer to use, let me know and I will put that name with the picture.

Thursday, September 9

Check out this seminar.

Thursday, September 2, posting 2

See the "resources" page for information about the books that somehow did not reach you.  I sent it out in early August, but no on seems to have gotten it.

Thursday, September 2

See the following note from our systems administrator about Unix installations.

Please use lineox 3.0 for linux installations on campus computers. We have a site license for it. Security updates are available for it. We have a fast local mirror for downloading updates.

We use it in our computer labs, so it's completely compatible with what students are using in the lab.

If you have a particular preference on linux you like to use, then go ahead and use it, just remember two things. Eg, we use gentoo on some dual opteron systems...

The network is toxic, therefore enable your firewall, and apply security updates on a daily or weekly basis. On average we get 20 network scans per computer per day. So in a sense we get 20 probes for vulnerabilities per computer per day. These same rules apply for setting up windows computers. Un-patched windows computers are exploited on average within 15 minutes of being connected to the network. This will certainly change when we implement a firewall, but in the interim, remember that the internet is full of an unlimited supply of programs and people trying to crack into your computer on a daily basis.

DL cd iso to burn lineox from: http://img.cs.montana.edu/iso/lineox-3.0/ Locally available iso's are: Parent Directory FC1/ FC2/ lineox-3.0/ rh73/ rh90/

Check the Faq for directions on configuring updates: http://www.cs.montana.edu/faq/faqw.py?query=lineox&querytype=simple&casefold=yes&req=search

Contact me with questions or comments. I will be more than happy to answer any patching/linux/security questions as concerns setting up a Linux desktop.

If you are a grad and are not on campus, tell me and I will pull you off this alias so you won't get campus related computer mailings. --Luke

 

Tuesday, August 31.  Be sure to access MyInfo on the MSU web site and set your e-mail address if you haven't already.  I will be using a standard distribution (listserve) based on these e-mail addresses to send information to the class occasionally.

Monday, August 30. An assignment has been posted on the assignment page.