Introductions

This project is intended 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 (acpub). 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 do not know your login or password, you can get it by visiting the Help Desk of the Office of Information Technology, OIT, in the North Building. The book Introduction to the Public Unix Clusters at Duke explains how to login, send mail, and read newsgroups.

Creating your Web page

For this course, you will create a web page that represents a portfolio of all of your projects. 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. Whether or not you already have a personal home page, you should create a separate page for this course.

To create the content for your web page, you can use the editor that comes with the Netscape or Internet Explorer browser or a standard modern word processor. These editors allow you write text or import images without worrying about the actual format used on the web. Even though it is not necessary for this assignment, if you would like to learn more about the hypertext markup language, HTML, you can look at a tutorial online here.

Your homepage must contain at least the following information:

your name
where you are from
a link to the CPS 4 homepage
a link to your favorite web site
your computing autobiography (see below)

Some suggestions for additional information include:

your nickname
your hobbies
your year of graduation
other courses you are taking
any other interesting web pages you know about

For more help on creating a web page, OIT has created a Duke-specific tutorial online here. For those having trouble being creative, you can fill in the template file here.

Computing Autobiography

Since computers are now so pervasive in society, everyone should have a variety of experiences using (or even programming) them. Before you start this course, you should take a moment to reflect on how these experiences have affected you and shaped your decision to learn to program (and to take this course).

Your autobiography should attempt to answer the following questions:

What experience do you have using computers?
If you have come this far, you must have had at least one or two good computing experiences. And, unless you are very unusual indeed, you have had at least one or two bad experiences along the way as well. What characterized these experiences?
How have the work and readings so far changed your perception of programming and programmers?
Why do you want to learn to program a computer?

Saving your Web Page

In order to view your web page on the World Wide Web, WWW, you must save it in a specific place and specific format in your acpub account.

PLACE: When you save your web page, it needs to end up in your P: partition. This is really your acpub file system, the same systems that handle your Duke e-mail. Web pages must be stored in a folder named public_html . Your acpub account will already have this folder set up. If you were to create a standard home page, it would be named index.html and reside here. However, we want to create a class home page, so we need to first create a folder (within your public_html folder) named cps4 . Your class home page (that you are creating for this assignment) must be saved in this cps4 folder and also be named index.html .

FORMAT: When you save your web page with a word processor, you must choose the option Save as HTML. In some word processors, this options is available directly within the File menu, on others it is an option within the dialog box that appears when you select the Save As option within the File menu. If you are using the editor within Netscape's browser, you do not need to worry about this complication since it is saved as HTML by default; simply save your web page.

Note, your web page must be named index.html and must be located in a folder named cps4 within your public_html folder. If you have done everything correctly, you (and anyone else in the world) can now view your course web page by going to
http://www.duke.edu/~acpubID/cps4/ where acpubID should be replaced with your acpub login. Note the ~ character in front of your acpub login.