Dr. Pekarek retired effective July 1, 2006

As of that date, Dr. James Wilkes is Chair of the Computer Science Department. His home page is http://www.cs.appstate.edu/~jtw/. You can email him at: wilkesjt@appstate.edu

Links to other CS Faculty

Documentation

• Building & Room Abbreviations

• Items related to the vi editor
• Unix email ... pine on Unix systems
• Reading email on VMS is now deprecated (or, perhaps more accurately, prohibited). Use The AppalNET link on the University home page, or see below for a note on some alternatives.

• Here is a link to a web site that has a copy of Tom Lehrer's New Math that's a "ditty" about subtraction (in both base 10 and base 8) that I often refer to.
• Number Representation and Arithmetic in Various Bases
  These are topics covered in CS 1100. Check your text and notes (you do have them don't you?). There are items on-line, including these from Dr. Parks:
  1. Numbers in Different Bases (by Dee Parks)
  2. Two's Complement (by Dee Parks)
  3. Real Number Representation

• links (and some notes) for advisors

• You can get versions of telnet (including ones that use SSH, e.g., putty and QVT-Term), FTP, vi clones, X-Terminal applications, ports of Unix tools, ... from (usually anonymous ftp) sites on the Internet. If you don't have these programs or are unhappy with the quality of ones you do have, consider getting replacements. The FTP client and the telnet client used in the public labs are available. Look here if you want to see more about getting such things.

• Installing and configuring PuTTY

• The University expects students to look at the email interface it calls "AppalNET" (see also the link on the University home page).

  Some important information for students may be distributed as "announcements" visible from the page youge after you "login to AppalNET" -- and not in either hard copy or conventional email. You need to look there for those messages -- you'll probably not get much sympathy if you don't.

  There are other interfaces you can use to read the email sent "to AppalNET". I know some faculty (myself included) who use Mozilla's Thunderbird to use that email repository. (I didn't like AppalNET's gripe that Mozilla wasn't a supported browser -- and I still don't.) I know others who use the iPlanet messaging server at http://appmail.appstate.edu/ Note, however, that neither of these shows you those "announcements". There's probably enough information in ACS's FAQ about setting up Outlook to answer the set up questions on one of the other mail user agents.

• CS faculty commonly send mail to their students on CS. Also, we maintain a mailing list of those "CS addresses" and use it to send out messages of interest to our students. Those messages include notes about on-campus activities and about job opportunities we hear about.

  Some of you run pine or elm on CS to read mail there, but some of you may wish to change where mail addressed

  your_login_name@cs.appstate.edu

  is delivered. You can do that by creating a ".forward" file in your home directory on CS. That file should be an ordinary text (ASCII) file with permissions 600 or 644. The file should contain a single line containing only the address to which you want mail to be redirected. Since that place could also have forwarding set, be careful that the address exists and that forwarding to it doesn't set up a "circular chain" of addresses.

  There are many command sequences you could use to set up forwarding. Here is an example of one way for a student whose username is an00678 and who reads mail at his AppalNet account to set up forwarding of his CS mail to his AppalNet account:

          1. Login to CS
          2. On CS type these commands:
               cd
               rm -f .forward
               echo  an00678@appstate.edu  > .forward
               chmod 600 .forward
          3. Logoff from CS
  

• Ghostscript is an interpreter for the PostScript page description language. Ghostview and GSview are viewers that use Ghostscript and display PostScript documents on your screen. You can get copies of these programs for free and install them on your system. Check out the Ghostscript Home Page for more information or to get a copy.

• The Bare Bones Guide to HTML

• Microsoft Security Issues
  Microsoft's web site has a page that reports known security issues, http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/current.aspx.

  If you have a PC for which any of the following is true:

  • You run MS Word.
  • You have MS Office
  • You have Visual Basic or a program that uses it.
  • You run Microsoft's Internet Explorer.
  • You run Microsoft's Outlook.
  • You read email or news with a program that runs on the PC.

  You need to read the reports and you ought to install some patches that they refer to. An easy way to get appropriate Operating System patches is to run Windows Update frequently.

• If you use some version of Microsoft Windows or Microsoft Office, you might find the following items useful.
  • I've found O'Reilly's Annoyances books useful. The authors of the books have web sites (with links to mor information about the books).
  • Windows Annoyances -- there are pages for several versions.
  • Microsoft Office Annoyances - The Site
  • Woody's Office Portal

• Henry Spencer's The Ten Commandments for C Programmers
  An HTML-ized copy of them. Warning:This link is to a system in Sweden. cs's /u/pub tree should have Postscript and ASCII versions of both the original and the annotated editions, and here are other local copies:
  • C_10-commandments/10-cmd-a.c-l Annotated version. formatted ASCII
  • C_10c/10-cmd-a.ps Annotated version. formatted PostScript
  • C_10c/10-cmd-a.tro Annotated version. Troff source
  • C_10c/ten_cmmd.c-l Original version. formatted ASCII
  • C_10c/ten_cmmd.ps Original version. formatted PostScript
  • C_10c/ten_cmmd.tro Original version. Troff source

• The Pronunciation Guide (version 2.5), a file describing names for punctuation marks; versions of this have been circulated in the net-news for years.
• the Jargon File
• Peter Neumann, moderator of COMP.RISKS and active in the software engineering community and in the ACM, has lots of things on the web. One of them might be called his only-page (not to be confused with one-and-only); he labels it: Only His Only Grammarian Can Only Say Only What Only He Only Means.

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File time-stamp: Saturday, 29-Jul-2006 15:31:31 EDT