Section:   CRN 91438, Tues/Thurs 2:00pm - 3:15pm, McBryde 126
Instructor:	Teaching Assistants (TAs):
Mr. Robert Capra Email: Office: McBryde 525 Office Hours: Tues/Thurs 10:30am - 11:30am & by appt.	Alain Fabian Zhiyan Shao Vidhya Vijayaraghavan Ian Will Megan Olsen GTA Office hours: TA Office Hours, McBryde 133
Information:
CS 2604 Syllabus and Course Policies (pdf) (updated, Aug 25, 2004) Curator (Submit): http://eags01.cs.vt.edu:8080/LC2/index.jsp Elements of Programming Style Curator (Information): http://www.cs.vt.edu/curator/ Departmental Policy on Koofers, Old Programs, Cheating, and Computer Use (pdf) Programming Standards CS Lab Homepage

• Final course grades should be available through Hokie SPA.
• Final exam grades (and quiz #10 grades) are posted as a grade report announcement to your Curator accounts.
• The plan was to post your final exam grades to the Blackboard system, but it has been taken down for an upgrade and maintenance until January 9, so the Curator was used instead.

• Gradesheets for Project #4 are now posted to the Curator accounts.
• Grades for Project #4 and Homework #4 are listed in the Blackboard grade book.

The final exam for CS 2604 will be held in Davidson 3, on Monday, December 13, from 7:00pm - 9:00pm.

• Solutions for Homework #4 have been posted on the homeworks section of this website.

• The last quiz (which I had planned to give on Dec 2 but forgot) will be given in-class on Tuesday, Dec. 7.
  Quiz #10 will have two questions: one to find a minimum spanning tree of a given graph, and a second to identify if a subgraph induced by removing some verticies of the given graph is a complete graph on four vertices (Ksub4).
  After the quiz, I will go over the solutions to the quiz since Dec. 7 is the last day of class.
• Also on Dec. 7:
  I will go over the solutions for Homework #4 and hand out course evaluations.
  I will also bring all the unclaimed, graded assignments that I have to class, so if you are missing a quiz, homework, or the mid-term you can pick it up then.
• Please see my post on the class discussion forum for a clarification of the BST deletion example that I talked about in class on Dec. 2: https://forum.cs.vt.edu/topic_show.pl?tid=15149

• Gradesheets for project #3 have been posted to Curator accounts.
• Grades for project #3 have been added to the grade book on Blackboard.
• On the class discussion forum, Dr. Shaffer has provided some good advice and clarifications about Project #4. I highlighted and discussed some of these at the end of class today. Below is a list of message threads that discuss some of the topics I mentioned. These message threads proably give more specifics than I was able to in the discussion in the last few minutes of class today, so I recommend reading these:
  • Flyweight Question -- https://forum.cs.vt.edu/topic_show.pl?tid=15035
  • Messages spanning multiple buffers -- https://forum.cs.vt.edu/topic_show.pl?tid=15010
  • Bintree storing a handle to the root -- https://forum.cs.vt.edu/topic_show.pl?tid=15045
  • Distinguishing leaf/internal nodes -- https://forum.cs.vt.edu/topic_show.pl?tid=15037
    (especially see replies by UTA Megan Olsen and Dr. Shaffer)

• Homework #4 was handed out in class on Nov 18 and has now been posted on the homework page of the web site.
• Homework #4 is due IN-CLASS at 2:00pm on Thursday, Dec 2.

• Some minor revisions to the Project 4 spec have been posted.
  There are two changes. Below is a summary of the changes as posted by Dr. Shaffer to the class forum and copied here:
  • The number of buffers in the buffer pool will be in the range 1-20.
  • The question came up as to how the client (the bintree) knows the length of the city name when that is returned from the memory manager. The layout for that message has now been specified (it wasn't in the original spec) as follows:
    
    "The city name will be sent to the memory manager as a separate message. This message will contain the length of the name in the first byte, followed by the characters for the name. The null character at the end of the city name string should not be included in the message, nor stored on disk."

• Graded Homework #3 papers were handed back in class today.
• Grades for Homework #3 are posted on Blackboard.
• A solution key for Homework #3 has been posted.

• Project #4 has been posted to the programming projects page of the website. Note that Project #4 is worth more points than the prior projects -- it is worth 150 points total. As such, the early bonus has been increased to 15 points and the late penalty has been increased to 30 points. Project #4 is the final programming project for the semester and the on-time due date is December 7.

• Homework #3 is due IN-CLASS at 2:00pm on Thursday, Oct 28.
• A test data file has been posted for Project #3. Please read the class forum posting by Dr. Shaffer titled, "Project 3 test data", to help understand aspects of this test data file.
• Grades for Project #2 have been posted in the on-line gradebook on Blackboard. Gradesheets for Project #2 are available for download from the Curator.

• Homework #3 was handed out in class today and is posted on the Homework section of this website. NOTE: This homework assignment will be handwritten and turned in in-class, at the start of class (2:00pm) on Thursday, October 28, 2004 Write your answers on the homework document in the space provided for each question. Be sure to write your name on each page and keep the pages stapled together. No late assignments will be accepted.

• Project #3 has been posted and is due Nov 2.

• On page #2 of the project #2 specification, in the description of the debug command it refers to Figure 13.5(a) in Dr. Shaffer's textbook. I think this should be referring to Figure 13.15(b). Figure 13.15(b) is included in section 13.3 of Dr. Shaffer's book that you can download from the projects page on the course website.

• Information about the search radius in Project #2 (copied here as it was posted by Dr. Shaffer on the class forum):
  • "Ideally, you would be comparing the search circle against the node's rectangle to decide whether to visit a node (subtree) during the regionsearch traversal. In practice, its just to hard to implement a circle vs. rectangle intersection operation, so we don't expect you to. Just compare the bounding box for the circle (i.e., a square) against the node's rectangle. When you get down to a leaf node, do a simple euclidean distance test. Actually, you don't even need to take the square root... just compare the sum of the squared differences in X and Y vs. the square of the radius."

• Grades for Homework #2 and Project #1 have been posted.
  • The grade sheets have been posted as announcements in your Curator account and can be downloaded from the Curator.
  • The scores have been entered into the on-line gradebook on Blackboard. You can review all your grades by loging into Blackboard at learn.vt.edu
  • On Homework #2, problems #2c and #2d both had indicies that started at zero and were multiplied by 2. This would result in an infinate loop. Because of confusion about these two problems, we accepted either the answer of infinity or the answer that assumes that the loop starts at 1.
• The graded mid-term exams will be handed back in class on Thursday (Sep 30). The mid-term exam grades will be posted on Blackboard after the exams have been handed back in class.
• It is a good idea to check the grades that appear on your graded work to make sure that they match the grades stored in the on-line gradebook on Blackboard. If you find any discrepencies, please let Mr. Capra know by email.
• Test data files have been posted for Project #2 on the projects page.
• Files used by the graders to test Project #1 have been posted on the projects page.
• A link has been posted on the projects page to some example code from Dr. Shaffer's book that shows an example of using inheritance for separate internal and leaf node representations for a binary tree.

• Some of this was announced in class on Tuesday, but here is information about the mid-term for my section:
  • The mid-term exam will cover material up to and including the BST material I covered in class on Tuesday, Sep. 21. Thus, BST properties and BST insert could be on the exam, but BST searching and delete will not.
  • The exam will be closed book, closed notes and no calculators will be allowed.
  • The exam will not take the entire class period. I will spend the non-exam time in class on Thursday talking about project #2.

• Solutions to Homework #2 have been posted.
• Because solutions have been posted, no late submissions will be accepted for Homework #2.

• Two koofers for the mid-term exam have been posted.
• Keep in mind that:
  • These koofers may have material that we have not covered yet and that may not be on the midterm this semester.
  • There may be material that we have covered that is not on the koofers, but could be on the midterm this semester.

• Project #2 has been posted and is due at 11:00pm on October 12.

• Homework #2 has been posted and is due at 5:00pm on September 21.
• A reminder that the MID-TERM EXAM will be in class on September 23.

• FOLLOW-UP ABOUT USED BLOCK LISTS
  In my (Capra) section, the concept of a "used block list" was discussed as a possible way for the Memory Manager to keep track of the sizes of the blocks that it had allocated.
  For my (Capra) section ONLY, if you have an implementation that uses the used block list approach, we will accept it.
  Keep in mind that your implementation still must follow good design principles and that you should have comments that explain and justify your design decisions. Specifically, you should include in your comments an explanation of the pros/cons of the used block list.

• VERY IMPORTANT -- PROJECT #1 SPECIFICATION ADDITION/CLARIFICATION
  Two important announcements about project #1:
  • There is an ADDITION to the project specification:
    When the memory manager is allocating space from a free block, it will allocate the FIRST bytes in that block. For example, lets say that the memory manager is given a request for 100 bytes. It chooses to satisfy this request from a block of 300 bytes. It is the FIRST 100 bytes of the 300 that get used, and the LAST 200 bytes are put back into the free block pool.
  • Also, a CLARIFICATION has been posted to the Class Discussion Forum: https://forum.cs.vt.edu/topic_show.pl?tid=14304

• A test data file has been posted for Project #1 on the "Programming Projects" section of this website.
• The TA office hours have been posted in a PDF document linked to in the "Teaching Assistants" section of the main course webpage.

• Correction: The mid-term will be on THURSDAY, Sep 23.
• The course notes have been dropped off at A-1 Copies and should be available by Monday (they may be available over the week-end, you might want to call before you go over).
• Curator accounts have been set-up and you should be receiving an automated email message from the Curator system.
• The TAs will begin holding their office hours starting Monday, Sep Aug 30. There will be a CS 2604 TA in McBryde 133 from 10:00am - 6:00pm, Monday through Friday.

• Several important changes have been made to the Syllabus and Course Policies:
  • The mid-term exam will be on Tuesday Thursday, September 23 (this will allow the mid-term to be graded before the last day to drop courses).
  • The late penalty for programming projects will be 20%.
  • Several topics have been re-ordered on the Tentative Calendar.
  • These three changes are reflected in a revised version of the CS 2604 Syllabus and Course Policies document posted in the Information section (see above) of this web page.
• Programming Project #1 has been posted and is due Sep 14.
  • The early bonus for Project #1 will be 10% and the late penalty will be 20%.
  • A section from Dr. Shaffer's book has been posted on the Programming Projects page that you can read for background on the project.

• Homework #1 has been posted and is due on Sep 2.
• Please note that Mr. Capra's office hours are listed incorrectly on the handout given in class.  The correct hours are:  Tues/Thurs from 10:30am - 11:30am and by appointment.
  

• Welcome to CS 2604!
• Attendance on the first day of class is mandatory.  If you do not attend class on the first day, you will be dropped from the course.
  
• Important announcements will be posted here throughout the semester.  It is the responsibility of each student to check these announcements daily.