Stewart Stremler wrote:
The CS students are expected to understand how to develop on *NIX,
as that's what they've been using since their first CS course. The
fact that most of 'em actively avoid how to be productive on a *NIX
box despite access, tutorials, guidance, help desk, and documentation
just goes to show how deep the M$ rot goes.
This is neither student-specific nor M$-specific. It's a much larger
problem of too much local optimization.
People rarely have the foresight to anticipate that a small hit learning
a tool *now* pays off *continuously*.
The biggest example of this is scripting. Almost nobody wants to take
the time *now* to learn Perl, Python, Ruby, Tcl, etc. The time saved
over the course of a career is *HUGE*--especially for Windows people who
don't have a decent shell. When I'm stuck on a Windows box, the first
two things I install are Java and Python.
The best example of this from last year was the opcode/hexadecimal
mapping for the assembler. Over 2/3 of the class typed the entire table
in (256 lines of error prone text -> hex). A couple people grabbed the
HTML from the web and created an editor macro (YAY! They get it ...).
I didn't know of anybody wrote a script to do it. Of course, even if
they did, they probably didn't consider it something worth mentioning to me.
I do not think that WebDAV is available. The web-server system is kind
of complicated. Adding WebDAV to the Solaris Apache installation isn't
hard once you install the SunCC compiler. This would require, as I
understand it, root to modify http.conf and to (presumably) point at
an htpasswd file in the instructors home directory.
WebDAV doesn't seem to be available by default. That's probably not an
option.
I set this up for fun some time ago, and only played with it myself, but
it worked. I'm not sure how it would scale, but Apache scales pretty big,
in general.
Most of the solutions seem to assume that the instructor is running
the server machine.
No, that's not acceptable. I want this solution to outlive my presence.
I want students to think this is such a good solution that when a
professor doesn't use it, students go to the office of the Dean and
complain.
I had students that mumbled and groaned and called me names; one group
came to me and said that they figured I was a complete prat, and then
the night before the assignment was due, they typed "rm * .class", and
weeks of work just vanished.
And then they did "cvs update" and only lost an hour of work. Instant
converts!
These are the lessons that students *need* to learn.
3 laptops died during my class. Those people are *religious* source
control converts.
In addition, the ability for me to pull the *exact* code and help people
out converted others. We didn't have to be physically in the same place
for me to help them out.
Finally, interviews with employers helped convert another bunch. Being
able to actually tell an interviewer that you actually used source
control generally garnered a positive response.
lot easier than 'Install putty, generate keys, install TortoiseSVN,
checkout, edit, check in, put a comment, etc.'
....sure, leave it for me to train the new hires how to do such things.
Heh.
-a
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