CS1109 Lab 1

General information

Derek, what are you expecting from me?
  • You attend one of the two labs each week. Each lasts two hours. An attendance record will be kept. Do not depart without permission.
  • The lab worksheets may often be too long to be completed in your 2 hour practical. Finish them in your own time. CS1109 should be occupying a total of about 9 hours of your time per week.
Why should I bother?
Apart from the sheer intellectual joy of it?

Well, because some of the work will count towards your overall mark for CS1109.

Which labs will count towards my overall mark?
This information will not be divulged until the end of the year. You are therefore advised to tackle all labs.
How many labs will count towards my overall mark?
Again, this is not divulged until the end of the year.
Will each lab count equally?
No — not necessarily. I may combine your marks using a weighted average so that what I consider to be the more difficult pieces of work count for more.
Can I use my laptop/PC at home to do the work?
Yes, but…
  • I still expect you to attend the lab.
  • It will be your responsibility to move your work to the Department server correctly. Students regularly screw up this process — they end up scoring zero.
What help will there be?
You can speak to me or my helpers in the labs. You can also speak to me after any lecture. Or you can email me or call into my office.
Can I get help from my friends?
No, not really…

You may discuss concepts from the lectures that you are having trouble with. Your friends may have found a way of explaining something that works better for you than the ways we explain things. But you cannot work together on the lab sheets, and you cannot share solutions or parts of solutions in any way.

Do not plagiarise the work of others.

Do not look at your friends' files; do not type their work into your files; do not ask them to send you their files; do not cut-and-paste solutions from their files or from the web; etc. etc.

In no way, shape or form should you submit work as if it were your own when some or all of it is not.

Be warned that I think that plagiarism is contemptible and I will apply the maximum penalties both to the person who submits the plagiarised work and to any person who helped them.

So now what?
Now start this week's work…

This week's work

In your public_html folder create a new folder called cs1109 (no spaces, all in lowercase!!!!!!). (If you are a Repeat Student, please delete or move any CS1109 lab work that you did previously so that it is no longer in your public_html/cs1109 folder.)

Inside this new folder, create another new folder called lab1 (no spaces, all in lowercase!!!!!!).

Now take copies of these three files and store them in your lab1 folder:

Mammy's Kitchen is a company that organizes cookery courses and other culinary events. It regularly publishes a newsletter, which it sends out by email. But it is toying with the idea of making the newletter available in alternative formats. Accordingly, you have been asked to convert the most recent newsletter (mk.doc) into a Web page.

You must produce just one Web page in a file called mk.html (no spaces, all in lowercase!!!!!!):

Do not write a stylesheet. Hence, do not concern yourself with issues of layout or other prettifying. (In particular, do not worry about the fact that yours will have different line-breaks from the original.) But since it is easier to develop tables with borders than without borders, you can link your Web page to your copy of mk.css, which contains just enough CSS to prettify the tables for you. Do not edit mk.css.

Submission

Deadline: 1 pm, Tuesday 16th October 2011.

If you have followed the instructions correctly, your work will be collected automatically by a program at exactly 1 pm next Tuesday. The program will send you an email, listing the files that it has collected from you. Read the list carefully to make sure it has collected what you expected.

If you have not followed the instructions (e.g. if you have not named your folders and files correctly), nothing will be collected, and you will score zero.

Do not email me to ask whether I will accept a late submission, even one that is late by as little as 1 minute. The answer will be: No.

However, if there is good reason why the work has not been finished (e.g. illness, family problems, etc.), then you should provide the Department with documentary evidence (e.g. a doctor's letter), you should speak to me, and I may make special arrangements for you.

Since this is your first submission, we will do a trial run. In other words, we will run the program to collect your work some time on Friday. I will send an email when it happens. This will give you a chance to see whether you are doing things correctly and it will give us a chance to check that the program functions correctly. Obviously, you can continue to improve your work between Friday and next Tuesday, since it is the version we collect next Tuesday that will be your 'official' submission. (This will be the one and only lab for which there is a trial run.)