CPS 124/296.3
Fall 2001

Introductions

This introductory assignment is meant to introduce you to your classmates and the course staff. It is also a lesson in following directions precisely.

Every Duke student is given an account on the Public Unix Clusters. If you are a new student, the account login id and password should have been mailed to you. If you have been here awhile and don't know your login or password, you can get this by visiting the Office of Information Technology (OIT) on the first floor of the North Building. The book "Introduction to the Public Unix Clusters at Duke" explains how to login, send mail, and read newsgroups.

Creating a Web page

For this course, you will be creating a portfolio of all of your projects on the World Wide Web (WWW). The course staff will use this page to track your progress throughout the course, so it is very important that you keep it up-to-date. Even if you do not already have a personal home page, you should create another page for this course in a separate directory within your public_html directory on acpub.

Your homepage must be created as follows:
it must be named index.html and must be located in a directory named cps124 within your public_html directory
it must contain at least the following information
title: CPS 124 Fall 2001
your name
where you are from
your computer science autobiography
a link to the cps124 homepage
it may also contain the following information
your nickname
your hobbies
etc. (perhaps like a personals ad :)

For help on creating a web page, click here. If you want you can copy a template file and fill it in with information, use the one here. A good introduction to HTML can be found here. Although, it is not necessary to know HTML to complete this assignment because most modern word processors can save as web pages (and Netscape even contains a built-in web page editor that automatically creates tags for you), it might be a good idea for you to learn the basics.

Computer Science Autobiography

Before you start this course, take a moment to reflect on how your experiences with computers have affected you and shaped your decision to program (and to take this course).

Your autobiography should attempt to answer the following questions:

Where are you in terms of computer science at this point in your life? 
How did you get here and where do you think you would like to go? 
Why are you interested in studying computer graphics?

Posting News

Post a brief note to the class newsgroup duke.cs.cps124 announcing the creation of your course web page (so we can all take a moment to visit it). You should include the actual link to the page to make it easier to visit. You should check later to make sure your note is posted. Sometimes it only takes a few minutes, but sometimes it takes an hour or two.

Your message must have the subject: 
CPS 124 : (your full name here)

For example, Professor Duvall would post his message with the subject line

CPS 124 : Robert Duvall

Of course, you would not believe how many people post with a different subject!
 

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