I know its a bit after the fact, but as I announced in class on Tuesday, there will be no class today. Spend this extra personal time working on your HW3, reading assignments (more will be posted tonight), and if you haven’t had a chance to do early voting, do that as well!
Here are the links to the slides from the last few lectures:
Finally, be sure to start reviewing the material we’ve been covering since the last exam. I’d like to schedule our next exam for next Thursday, November 6th. You can expect to see material from the first exam (eg. HTML, CSS, Binary/Hex conversion) along with material that we’ve covered since then, including the articles as well. I’ll also allow some time on Tuesday for questions about the material thus far.
October 30, 2008
The link below contains an excellent documentary about the history of computing, covering the items we touched on and much more. I highly recommend you watch this, so much so that I’ll even accept a comment on it as a bonus article. Just be sure to do so by next Thursday at midnight.
The Machine that Changed the World
October 23, 2008
Now that we’ve learning a bit about vector graphics, I want you guys to try your hand at using them! Work with a partner using your favorite vector graphics program (eg. Inkscape, Illustrator, Flash, etc.) to make your very own web comic. This comic should be short (max 4 frames) and available in both compressed bitmap (eg. png, gif, jpg) and vector (use svg) formats. These will then be embedded and linked on a web page, similar to the one you made in HW2.
Here are a few popular web comics to use as an example. I’ll also be producing my own to provide as yet another (albeit less awesome) example:
- XKCD – though this is about as simple as it gets, its still pretty funny (although sometimes a bit mature)
- Penny Arcade – one of the first, and still one of the best
- VG Cats
- PvP
- Post any other exciting example comics in the comments!
This will be due two weeks from today, Thursday, November 6th by midnight.
October 23, 2008
Read the article listed below and post a comment on it. Your comment should be at least two paragraphs and reflect your take on the contents of the articles. Do NOT skim or altogether skip the reading and just post your thoughts. I’ll more than likely be able to tell, and you will NOT get credit.
Comments will be open until next Thursday at midnight.
Sleuths Crack Tracking Code Discovered in Color Printers
October 23, 2008
Read the article listed below and post a comment on it. Your comment should be at least two paragraphs and reflect your take on the contents of the articles. Do NOT skim or altogether skip the reading and just post your thoughts. I’ll more than likely be able to tell, and you will NOT get credit.
Comments will be open until next Thursday at midnight.
3D Printing
October 23, 2008
I received word this afternnon that all of the Sulley forms that I submitted have been processed. You will NOT receive email notification, however. This should serve as your official (albeit impersonal) notification.
Your Sulley account name will be your NID, and your default password will be your PID. Please change this ASAP as neither piece of information is impossible to find out. If you aren’t prompted to change it the first time you log in over SSH, you can tell it to change my typing “passwd”. It will first ask you for your old password to confirm that you’re you, and then have you type in your new password twice. Please use something that is > 6 characters long and contains at least a couple numbers, unusual characters, or capital letters.
If you are still having problems with your Sulley account, talk to me tomorrow before or after class so we can try logging in. Also, if you’ve already submitted your HW to me as an email, you are certainly welcomed to upload it and submit again as a comment. This should result in you getting a grade back more quickly as I will grade the uploaded assignments first.
October 22, 2008
Last Thursday, we went through these slides, providing a more theoretical background on vector graphics. Tonight, we went through some examples as seen through Inkscape and GIMP, vector-based and raster/bitmap-based graphics editing programs, respectively. I will post a few screen grabs and example files later in the week.
We also discussed how to submit HW2. My first preference would be for you to use either the Sulley or Pegasus web servers. As was mentioned in class, you all should have Pegasus accounts already, and hopefully Sulley accounts will be created shortly (if not already). Try SSH or SFTPing into either one using one of the following programs:
I suggest trying on-campus first to make sure your username/password work, but you can still connect from home after connecting to UCF’s VPN.
Be sure to place your files in “public_html” folder on whichever server you use. Your URL will be something like http://sulley.dm.ucf.edu/~YOURNID/hw2.html or http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~YOURNID/hw2.html where hw2.html is your file name. If you use your own webhost, please check with them for where to place your code.
Once uploaded, post you and your partner’s names and the URL in a comment under the original HW2 assignment posting on this blog. If you don’t have a server to post your code to, please zip up your various project files (eg. html, png, jpg, gif, etc.) and email it to <my>.<name> @ gmail.com with the subject “DIG2000 HW2″. Make sure that no matter how you deliver it, all code is submitted by midnight THIS THURSDAY. Remember, I will not accept late homework. If you have any doubts, submit it early just in case.
Also, one final note about working with partners. You certainly don’t have to continue working with the same partner for each assignment. For whatever reason, you’re welcome to switch things up. This should also help those of you that might not have had a partner work out for this first joint assignment. Keep looking as new assignments are posted! Use the comment system on this site as some of you already have if necessary to find someone.
October 22, 2008
I passed back the tests and went over the correct answers. Your grades are posted on myUCFGrades for both exam 1 and HW1. Please judge accordingly whether or not you want to drop, but make sure you do so before this Friday (the drop deadline).
Though I had indicated in class that you’d have readings this week, I have decided to push those back until next week to give you more time to work on your second HW assignment.
Finally, we covered lectures on Analog/Digital and half of Graphics.
October 15, 2008
For your first assignment using HTML and CSS, I thought we’d start working together in teams! This doesn’t equate to find some poor sap to do the heavy mental lifting, however. Find yourself a partner (no, you can’t have teams > 2), read the description and image that follows, and get to work!
You and your partner have figured out the next big thing in internet culture. This thing could be bigger than RickRoll, but you have to get it out to the world. Make a single page that, at its center, contains something you want to present to the world – an image, an embedded video, a fun flash animation, WHATEVER! You can either represent something that you love from another site, or make something original yourself and present that. Just make sure its all-ages appropriate.
Here’s what I had in mind in pictorial form:
Example Web Page
I’ll tell you about how to submit this assignment in a future posting, but for now just be sure that you can make what I’ve described with HTML and CSS. You’ll be improving up this at a later time, so don’t worry too much if its fairly simple. That’s exactly what I want for this first draft.
This is not due for two weeks, but get started now! I’m sure you’ll have a few questions once you get going, and I want to be able to help everyone figure it out.
October 9, 2008
Just a reminder, but there will be NO CLASS this Tuesday as I am out of town and you should be busily working on getting your Sulley account forms completed for me to sign on Thursday.
Also, your grades will not be posted for your first exam any time before next Tuesday. This is due to UCF’s test scoring service no longer supporting the scantrons we used, something I found rather surprising given that they’re still widely sold on campus. I’m going to look into find a machine that does still scan these, but either that or hand-grading them won’t be ready until after the weekend. Thank you for your patience with this!
Don’t forget about the readings posted, and I’ll see you all on Thursday!
October 6, 2008
