last day!

Let us omit project 3K from your list, but I definitely want to see your results for 3A and 3B. Today you may choose to work on either of these or on your Logo final project. 3A and 3B must be submitted by the end of class today. The final project is due at 6 pm on Friday.

Access day one

Today, Projects 3A, 3B, and 3K in the green book. (These are projects 12A and 12B if you have the enormous green book.) Please complete A and B and mail them to yourself before Wednesday's class.

Alive Day

I encourage all students to attend the Alive Day showing in AA 158 (across from the computer lab) at 5:30 p.m. on Tuesday, April 20. Marine Michael Jernigan, one of the wounded Iraq veterans featured in the HBO program, is a student on this campus, and he will be speaking at this event.

final project and Logo inspiration

Click here for details on your final project.
Due date: Friday, May 9, at 6 p.m.

Great art sites:

Very colorful and inspiring! click

Lots of color and 3D click

Give these plenty of time to load! click

Old favorites click

for Monday, April 21 and Wednesday, April 23

Today we will talk more about x-y geometry in Logo. Then you can choose to use either x-y or turtle geometry in your program.

We will also talk about random numbers. This means choosing a number by chance, not knowing in advance what it will be. This is how computers simulate playing cards and rolling dice. (Cards and dice are truly random, in a fair game; in a computer, since it's a program, it's pseudo-random.)

See page 10 of the handout for a random walk. See the program bug for a simple, silly example.

Working by yourself or with your partner, write a program surprise with (at least!) these three elements:

• randomly chosen regular polygon or star


• drawn in a randomly chosen location


• in a randomly chosen color

You'll need three sets of if statements to make this work. See page 10 for one set of if statements.

I usually prefer to work with a set of colors that I have chosen in advance, but you can make your colors completely random — the post below this one tells how.

Suggestion: work on the three required elements separately, then combine them. Everything you need to know is in the Logo handout! The beauty of programming is that you don't have to do it in a prescribed way; you are free to invent your own alternative way of doing things.

Submit your work by showing it to me at your desk, then copying the text of your program (with all its procedures) into an e-mail to me. If you work with another student, then make sure that both programmers send me the e-mail.

Random colors, filling an enclosed space

I usually do random colors by selecting one from a set of several using if statments (e.g., if :rn = 2 [...set pen to second color choice...]), but here's a way of making your color even more unknown:

to randomColor

make "myRed random 256
make "myGreen random 256
make "myBlue random 256

setpc (list :myRed :myGreen :myBlue)
setfc (list :myRed :myGreen :myBlue)

end

Here are methods for making a square frame in the center of the screen and then filling with random colors:

to centerSquare

penup

; go to lower right corner of square
bk 300 rt 90 fd 300 lt 90
pendown
repeat 4 [fd 600 lt 90]

; back to center
penup
fd 300 lt 90 fd 300 rt 90

end

to centerSquareColors
hideturtle
clearscreen
repeat 100 [
randomColor
centerSquare
fill
wait 75
]
showturtle
end


Logo day 3

Objective 1: to understand the idea of writing a procedure rather than commanding the turtle one line at a time.

Objective 2: using a procedure within a procedure and a loop, make a flower out of a squiggle. Like this:

to squiggle
... your code for a squiggle here ...
end

to flower
repeat X [
squiggle
rt Y
... or lt Y ...
... optional fd N or bk N ...
... or some combination of these ...
]
end

Certain choices for X and Y will guarantee a wonderful rotational symmetry. But what are they? Figure that out.

Objective 3: a word flower. I will show you a simple example.

Objective 5: to enhance our drawings with color that is changed by the program.

Logo day 1

Today I will bring hard copies of my minimum opus on Logo, which you may also view here — click.

In case you're at a machine without Logo, download this, which is MSW Logo by George Mills et al.

I do hope that you will find this art site as inspirational as I do.

Here's a concise list of commands for Logo, which is taken from this wonderful complete college course in computing with Logo.

You can also read Brian Harvey's books online (scroll down the page) — click. Serious fun.

Programming day one

First thing to do: Move everything you want to keep from the machine you have been using to your webspace using Filezilla. We are going to change some seats around.

Second: We will begin programming today. Here's my presentation on Basic programming. You will get a hard copy, too.

Week 9: PowerPoint

Current assignment: a judiciously composed PowerPoint based on your ten-item web bibliography.

Judicious? You shouldn't even try to show everything. Pick some of the best stuff, and use PowerPoint tools to make good illustrations of your thoughts.

Many links on PowerPoint style follow. Check them out — they're fun!

This project is due via e-mail by 8 am, Monday, March 24. Submit it by sending me a zip file of your PowerPoint attached to an e-mail.

Tufte's lament click

Derek Miller's collection click includes two exemplary photos

Death to PowerPoints? not really click

viral video showing a popular minimalist style
click

"Presentations are as much about slides as poetry is about handwriting," according to Doc Searls click

two strictly HTML alternatives to PowerPoint: S5 click and Slidy click — small file sizes, as portable as websurfing, accessible to us with our knowledge of CSS!

Excel day two

Today's two Excel projects are described on handouts. Here is the file for the first.

Super-long URLs

A student showed me that the URL for a reference she found via the NVCC library website was one of those amazingly long ones, and although we worked on it for several minutes, we couldn't find a short version of the same URL. (Maybe there isn't one.) So if you get one of those, it is OK to say, "Click here for source," and make a link to the source.

But only for the amazingly long kind of URL! Ordinary medium-long URLs should still be cited in the given form.

Remind-o: Web bibiliography due Friday

Your web bibliography is due Friday at 8 a.m. How you submit it is by sending me a link to your page, which must be running in your NVCC webspace.

Here's a recap on the assignment.

Here's a link to the how-to on Filezilla. Yes, you can follow these directions to get Filezilla on your home computer.

Warning! The college servers will be getting some maintenance on Friday morning from 12:00 a.m. to 2 a.m. (I just got an e-mail.) Your work is still due at 8 a.m.

Excel day one

I note that about half the class claims some experience with Excel. Therefore, my plan is to show some Excel techniques that I find most useful, then turn you loose to work on today's project, which is project 2G beginning on page 177.

Please note that correct use of formulas and formats is required!

If you don't have a lot of experience using Excel already, then I recommend going through the steps of projects 2A and 2B first.

Get today's files here

I mean, here.

Day 1 for MS Office

Today we begin working on Microsoft Office programs, for which you need your green book. I will post files here. Today we have Word projects 1H_Invitation, 1H_Letterhead, 1I_Fax_Cover, and 1I_Fax_Machine.

Warning! computer cleaning

All of the computers in room AA 156 (our classroom) are going to be hosed off on Friday, February 15. Save your work before that happens!

Save by uploading to your webspace, or by e-mailing to yourself (in a zip file, natch), or by copying to a thumb drive.

110 day nine: stylesheets

Today we start writing HTML with stylesheets, which make good layouts easier, compared to tables. In fact, most web pages combine the two techniques. Here's a template to use.

Also today we will talk about your research assignment, which is due at 8 a.m. on Friday, February 29.

Day 8, I think: whitespace

Click here for a page without whitespace. See how much better to see how it looks with whitespace?

Day 7: formatting HTML with tables

In old-school HTML, our only tool for controlling layout on the screen was to use rectangular tables and tables within tables. The method is crude and cumbersome, but effective. Some work with tables will make you salivate when we get to stylesheets, next meeting.

To see today's handout, click here.

References in the book:

• Chapter 3 generally


• simple examples, beginning page 83




• table, tr, td tags


• align, border, bordercolor attributes


• cellspacing, cellpadding attributes


• bgcolor attribute


• colspan, rowspan attribute

On pages 97, 100, and 110 you can see some sample formats. Look at some of your favorite webpages for rectangular tables.

Assignment for today: Make four (4!) webpages. Use the drawings on the handout for models. Fill the cells of the table with pleasing colors, chosen from combinations that you find using the color chooser. When you have finished all four, show them to me.

Day 6: protocols and uploading

(revised after class to say what we actually did)

Today we will begin with a short discussion of Internet protocols. Then we will talk about uploading files to the web using Filezilla FTP.

Get Filezilla FTP here. Be sure to get the client program.

When you use Filezilla, you will need to specify:

host:  www.student.nvcc.edu
username: nvstu\yourID (example, vfitton)
password:
port: (leave blank)

then click Quickconnect.

On the left, go through the file tree to get to your Desktop and the web folder you created on it.

On the right, if you can't yet see a folder with your name in the Remote window, click on the folder tree and find it. (Sorry to be so vague, but we were getting varying results in the lab.)

Pick up the entire web folder from the Desktop on the left and drop it on the folder with your name on the right. In the filename folder, lower right, double click on the web folder that should now be visible, and make sure it's got what it should.

In the browser, use this URL:

www.student.nvcc.edu/home/yourID/web/yourPage.html

substituting your own LAN ID and page names. When successful, send me an e-mail with the URL. Send it to everyone!

Click the same Quickconnect button to close your connection with the server.

day five: tables in web pages, color

On Monday we began a 32-minute biography. Today let us complete a one-hour biography, after a discussion of color.
Here are some beautiful color links:

• all the web-safe colors
• an alternative ordering of web-safe colors
• colors and their goofy web-safe names
• color neighbors
• this one is a little complex, but beautiful

Biography requirements:

• all new content
• at least two colors
• at least two fonts
• at least two pictures
• at least four links
• and last, but not least, all the links must work!

When this is finished — homework! — zip the whole web folder and send it to me (vfitton at nvcc.edu) with subject line "110 web biography" and tell me the name of your page in the body of your letter.

Here's a silly bio I made a few years ago — click. And here is another page I made about one of my interests — click.

Day three: making web pages

Don't know yet if our zip problem is fixed. It will be soon, no doubt. Meanwhile, today,we will:

• discuss file types
• discuss the Windows file system
• make a web page

In working on the web page, we'll be going back and forth between two applications:

• the browser, Internet Explorer or Firefox, for admiring our work and for looking for ideas
• the editor, TextPad, for writing the HTML code for our page

Follow these steps:

• Create a folder called web on the desktop.
• In the browser, do View / Source on this page, then copy and paste it into the editor.
  Make changes to please yourself in the code.
• In TextPad, do File/Save As to save the code. Name it pagezero.html and put it in the web folder.
• Now admire your page in the browser!
  Make some changes, and admire it even more.

After pagezero comes pageone.

Reading assignment: pages 23 to 38 of the text by Felke-Morris (brown cover). The reference pages from 221 to 259 suggest lots of fun things to do, as well as where we're going.

Day two: everyday definitions and tasks

Today we will discuss two view (at least!) of a computer system and define some fundamental terms.

Assignment: Zip together three files to be names as we go along and attach them in an e-mail to me.

Day one, spring 2008

Welcome to CSC 110!

Today's agenda:

• introductory rituals: syllabus and survey
• LAN and VCCS account names and passwords —
  click here, see item 1
• Safari database — click here
• e-mail to instructor, vfitton@nvcc.edu

For the e-mail, which you may send from anywhere, please include the following:

• 110 as the first thing in the subject line
• your real name
• title of Safari book that you choose and a link to it
• your LAN ID for using NVCC computers
• your NovaConnect ID