For those students who wish to follow the lecture using an RSS reader, here are a few URLS.

The enhanced podcast (iTunes, iPod, iPhone friendly) is at http://www.skoda.net/feed/podcast

The mp3 plain podcast is at http://www.skoda.net/feed/podcast/?format=plain

I’ve entered in grades for all lab write-ups that I have found in my inbox.   If you still don’t have a grades for something, send me the write up tonight or tomorrow.  If you are having troubles with my VTC email account, use my gmail jackfs4 at gmail.com.

I will do one last round of lab grading tomorrow night and then Thursday is the day I submit final grades to the registrar.

Some pointers:

• If you have already sent it, send it again.
• If submitted with a partner, send it with your name on it
• Don’t ask for a reply, I’m grading too many to honor requests for “can you let me know you got it,” sorry.

The final for CIS2230 is posted on blackboard and ready for students.  You can take the exam early if you wish.  Please work alone.  The exam is open book and open note.  Do not share answers or questions with other students.  Select the BEST answer for the question.  Good luck and please email me if you cannot see the exam on blackboard.

Any and all labs that I have in my possession are now graded and the grades are posted on Blackboard. Please review the information BEFORE taking the final exam and ensure that I have all the work you believe you have handed in to me.

Some caveats and hints about grades:

- Exams and quizzes are open.  Take any and all of these that you did not take yet.  Don’t stress out about late policies, just take the quiz.  If you are locked out of blackboard you must tell me BEFORE Monday 4 May or I will have no choice but to give you zeros for missing exam/quiz/labs.
- If you worked on a lab with someone and your partner failed to write your name on the report, you must send me a report with your name on it. Please do not email me with, “I should have a grade on labs 1-12, I worked on them with Bob and Jeff”

Yes, I have had students in the past try to join lab partnerships in the last week of the semester in order to get a better grade. You must turn in a copy of the lab write up with your name on it.

I take a quick look through the last few chapters of the book. We’ll return to the networking chapters in the next week.

[podcast]http://www.skoda.net/podcast/cis2230-ep13.mp3[/podcast]

Yes, I do know that you are all on break.  I wanted to get ahead of the labs with the lectures so I’m posting this early.  You don’t have to listen to this until you get back.

The web site I refer to is http://www.angelfire.com/myband/binusoman/Unix.html#start

[podcast]http://skoda.net/podcast/cis2230-ep11.mp3[/podcast]

Here’s a little levity that will dispel any left over lab #9 angst.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xD-Huwlg2kY[/youtube]

Many of the write-ups coming in for lab #9 are expressing angst and frustration.  Lab #9 is one of those labs where I want you to mess around and experiment and explore.  It’s one of those horrible vague lab handouts because in the real world you won’t be given a checklist of things to do in order to succeed at your job.  Bosses never say things like, “please go to this site, download abc.tar.gz, use the command tar xzvf abc<TAB> to uncompress it into directory /usr/src/project9, then cd to that directory, type configure, then make, then make install, and edit the file /var/www/html/conf.php with the following…”

Bosses are going to lundberg up to your cube on a Friday afternoon and go, “hi Peter, what’s happening… yeah… we want a corporate blog server for our TPS reports… can you have that done by Monday… great…. bye”

That’s why there a few labs in my classes that are not formatted in the standard “follow the 12 steps and record your answer.”  Yes, lab #9 is one of them.  I want you to play around with fork(), exec(), system(), top, ps, and vmstat.  I want you to experiment on your own and try different things.  Try to break the OS.  Try to freeze your machine.  Play CSI with the child parent relationship in Linux processes.  Who dies or zombies when you start killing things?  Can you renice your way into a dog-slow system and can you renice your way to a recovery?

Please don’t fear for your grade on this lab.  If you did some work and documented it, rest assured you will get credit.  If you blew it off or just copy/paste my same code with little to no write up, then expect a lesser grade.

The purpose of the lab is to goof around with processes, parent/child relationships, and process priorities.  If you did that, then you accomplished what I wanted you to do.

More from chapter 15, especially memory management.  Here’s the link to the page  I want you to read about memory management http://www.linux-tutorial.info/modules.php?name=MContent&pageid=89

[podcast]http://www.skoda.net/podcast/cis2230-ep10.mp3[/podcast]

I’m working on a solution to allow me to post lecturecasts while I’m away. Right now I can’t ftp the .mp3 and .m4a files from the hotel because of some fairly severe bandwidth restrictions and filtering.