COSC 3461 - Announcements

I've just heard from the teck people that there's been a problem with the courseInfo command reporting an error reading the "infoFile". They tell me that this problem has now been fixed - if you still get an error message when you use courseInfo, please let me know.

Your final grades will be made available next week through the courseInfo command.

I will be at my office hours tomorrow (Thursday the 28th, from 1:00 - 2:00 pm).

There has been talk by some of you about going for a beer to celebrate the end the course, so next Wednesday (May 4th) I will head over to BlueBerry Hill (on campus, in York Lanes) around 2:00 pm. I'm going to bring my laptop with the Assignment #3 solutions, so if you want to see the A+, or if you're just thirsty, then come for a beer!

Don't forget about the Final Exam on Wednesday!

Assignment #3 is due tomorrow, Friday April 1st, at midnight.

The final exam will be at 9:00 AM, on Wednesday April 27th, in CB 121 (CB = the Chemistry Building, which used to be known as the Chemistry and Computer Science Building).

Some information on the final exam is available here.

I will not be holding regular office hours in April, but I will meet students during my office hours (1:00 PM - 2:00 PM, Tuesdays and Thursdays) if you send me an e-mail to make an appointment.

Don't forget to keep checking this webpage - there will be announcements between now and the final exam.

Thanks for a great term - see you at the final exam!

The Milgram Obedience Experiment is discussed here.

The Hawthorne Effect is discussed here, and, here.

Some discussion of Wizard of Oz experimentation techniques appears here, and, here. A research paper employing the Wizard of Oz technique is available here.

Also I noticed a couple of lines of code in the a3glasspane.java program that were not needed (I must have been very sleepy when I wrote that program!) so I'm posting a cleaned-up version, a3glasspane.java.

Our classes this term usually have started a little past 4:00 pm, because (if I'm not late myself) I like to leave a little room for stragglers. But today we will need all of the time available to us, so I will try to get going promptly at 4.

Last class I showed a program that demonstrates how you can define your own interface, and how to use objects of your interface class. That program is interfacedemo.java. As I said in class - classes and interfaces are very useful features of the Java programming language. The improved organisation of your code due to appropriate use of classes and interfaces can significantly reduce your work-load, simplifies finding and fixing bugs, and makes it easier to extend your code later.

Some students have complained that they've found bugs in Java/SWING. If your program crashes or behaves strangly, it is much more likely to be a bug in your code than a problem with SWING. And regardless of where the bug is, you've still got to investigate it to find your work-around. A really useful debugging tool is "System.out". All of the events and widgets have "toString" functions that provide useful information.

To the fellow who spoke to me after class claiming that you can only use ".getSource" once on an event object, check-out the comments in the above program, right at the end of the action listener.

   JTextArea.setLineWrap(true);
   JTextArea.setWrapStyleWord(true);
   

In Assignment #1, note #8 states that you are not allowed to use the "york" package (a library of utility routines intended for the first-year students). Apparently this package has been renamed the "Type" package. Although not strictly a requirement - it would be helpful to the TA if you do not use the "Type" package either.

Here are links to the pages in the Java Tutorial that we talked about during class today on The Root Pane, JFrames, JPanels, and Borders.

Some of you were interested in the batch file I use to compile and run java programs during class. The batch file is called j.bat. Put this file in your c:\windows directory (that way, it's in the DOS path). When you use the j program, leave the ".java" off the Java filename. For example, to compile and run the "DemoHelloWorld.java" program, type "j DemoHelloWorld". For this program to work for you, you need the java and javac programs to be in the DOS path. To see the DOS path under Windows XP, go to the control panel, open System, choose the Advanced tab at the top of the window, and click on the Environment Variables button at the bottom. Make-sure that the Java binaries path appears in the PATH variable at the bottom. The default Java binaries path is c:\j2sdk1.4.2_01\bin and so this is likely the path you should add to the PATH variable, unless you installed java somewhere else on your computer. (Note! Semicolons are used to delimit the paths specified in the PATH variable.)

Also, if you already had Java installed on your home machine, don't forget to check the version and upgrade it if necessary. There's a link on the main 3461 page to the Java download page. You can find your version of Java by typing java −version. You should have Java 2, build 1.4.2.

Preliminary versions of my slides will be available for download from this website the morning of each lecture. The source code for programs demonstrated in class is available here.