The SD2 minor project is done!
In the end, the “catch up” lab I was offering was over attended, as expected (where did my helper go?) and ran an hour over time. But after a little over three hours of prac assessment, I got everyone marked.
The final results look a little like this…
I am very happy to see that about 30% of all students have scored 100%!
And that only 16% did do anything. It’s normaly around 30% in first year programming subjects.
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I just got off the phone from Optus. I was on hold for half an hour before anyone spoke to me.
This time it was about our normal phone bill. Part of the shift to the new ADSL2 line was from Optus taking control of their own copper lines. So instead of leasing lines from Telstra, they now have their own lines, at least in our area.
This means that previously Optus charged line rental for the period you had just used. Now they charge in advance for the time you are about to use. The only problem with this is that I get slugged for line rental twice in the same billing period. Once for the last three month, and then again for the next three months. Both bills due on the same day (today). This is going to look very nice on their balance sheet for the current quarter 
Of course the woman I spoke to didn’t seem to want to talk about it in those terms. She just kept trying to reassure me that I wasn’t getting charged twice for phone calls. Stuff the phone calls, what about my line rental?
In the mean time, I’m paying them twice and don’t get to see any benefit for it.
Not happy Jan!
In other news, the lovely new Linsys modem I got never did work. Finaly Linksys said “bring it back and we will look at it”. So it’s been back at the shop since before Easter and I haven’t heard anything yet. At least the old DLink is working. It doens’t over heat as much now that I ripped the face plate off as per Clintons suggestion. Much better now.
But I want my ADSL2!
I’m seriously thinking about moving from Optusnet to a new ISP. Anyone got any suggestions?
Two interesting articles today in The Australian…
The open source one is cool since Clinton has for some time been preaching the virtues of Moodle. Hands up who loves Blackboard? Nobody? Case closed.
The pod cast thing is also interesting since I experimented with the same last year. The main issue i had at the time was that I had to do all the recording and editing etc on my own laptop, by myself. Not that it was that hard, but it was time consuming. This year, our own Learning and Teach Support group have deployed Lectopia (yes, that’s what it’s realy called). I’m planning on giving it a test drive next week. Since I lost a lecture this week due to ANZAC day, I was goinf to run a catch up lecture during consultations week. You shoulda heard the groans when I announced that one
But if this Lectopia thing work as advertised, I shoudl be able to podcast (or similar) the lecture.
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An interesting article.
www.theregister.co.uk/security/security_report_windows_vs_linux/
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A few weeks ago I started the journey into the land of parsers. Having failed to build a satisfactory one by hand, I started working with paser generators. First I looked at javacc, but found it to be poorly documented and assumed a lot of prior knowledge. Knowledge I didn’t have since I haven’t studied a proper comp sci course, nor have I ever writen a compiler from scratch.
So I gave up on javacc.
I turned to ANTLR, which I had been told was more user friendly. But I found it’s documentation to be just as bad.
Since I didn’t have any other alternatives at that point, I stuck with ANTLR and have been bashing my head against it for the last 2 weeks. I actualy like the way it’s structured. A lexar reads a stream of chars. A parser reads a stream of token provided by the lexer. It’s pretty neat. But the devil is in the details and I was getting way to many ambiguity warnings and the lookahead was getting bigger and bigger trying to resolve them. I know there is probably a smarted way to solve the problems I was having, but finding the answers to my questions was getting harder and harder.
I did get some good help from the ANTLR mailing list, but in the end (about 11 am today, actually) I threw in the towel.
I downloaded and installed javacc again and tried it one more time.
Now this is where the learning curve comes in. I’ve been struggling with this stuff for two weeks. But in the last three hours since installing javacc, I have gotten a parser up to, and beyond, what I was doing in ANTLR. I wish I could explain it. But the rules I was able to write in javacc just seemed to make sense to me now. Something I still don’t feel with ANTLR. I only recieved one ambiguity warning which was easily resolved with a lookahead of 2, (not the lookahead of 16 I was considering in antlr)
What changed? My level of understanding. That’s all.
I still think the documentation is uniformaly poor for both these tool, especialy if you rely are a newbie to this parser stuff. But now that I’m back on javacc, I’m finding it’s tutorials better structured. At least they build on each other in a predictable way. ANTLRs tutorials seem ad hoc.
But if there is a moral to this story, it is:
With just over a week to go, the results for the SD2 assignment are starting to look better.
The number of students who have submitted work now exceeds those who haven’t. But the major assignment gets released this week, so people have got a lot of work to do. But I am happy to see results trickling in, and that most students are getting reasonable scores now.
I just spent a little over half an hour on the phone with Optus tech support. To summarise: “You’re not using one of our modems. We won’t help you.”
I am trying to noodle out what the correct connection settings should be for my new Linksys WAG54g v2. But optus won’t give them to me.
“We don’t support your device. We can’t know what the settings should be.”
“They are standard network settings specific to your network, not my device. Please tell me what they are.”
“No. We don’t support that device.”
Great.
So I found a diagnositic utility on the D-Link web site and was able to pull the network settings off the old modem (the D-Link one). But there are still some issues. I hope to crack this nut soon.
In the mean time, the (un)helpful, but friendly, optus tech guy said I should plug in the D-Link, and then they could monitor the device and see what might be going wrong with the network or with my computer.
What?
It appears that optus leaves some kind of remote diagnostic utility running and enabled on the D-Link modem so that they can check up on the device. I can see their point of view since it’s got to make trouble shooting easy. But still…THEY HAVE REMOTE ACCESS TO MY MODEM!!!!!!!
And no, I don’t seem to be able to turn it off since the config utility is customised by Optus. I suppose I could always flash the device with new firmware directly from D-Link.
But how long is it going to be for some lame script kiddie (how I love them 
) to figure out what setting optus is using and starts reconfiguring my modem from the comfort of his dark and dingy little bedroom !?
The tech guy suggested I not use my new Linksys modem because he couldn’t see it on the network. Well I kinda like that idea. Now if I could only get it to work properly…
Just to follow Andrews lead, I’m posting a chart of the number of students who have completed assessment items in SD2 this semester…
I worked with an idea from a previous semester by setting a number of small assessment tasks worth from 1% to 3% each. A student just has to complete enough of these to accumulate 12% to have achieved their minor assessment mark. (There is still a single large assignment to be completed worth 18%).
The above chart shows how many students have achieved what marks. Keep in mind that the students still have about two weeks to get this work done. The depressing figure is that 59% of all of my students have yet to even start! They haven’t even completed any of the 1% tasks which should be less than 50 lines of code. Considering that I have even walked through some of the solutions in the lectures, I just don’t get why so few have done the work.
Considering that lecture attendance is around 30% at the moment, I can’t help wonder at the coralation between the 60% that don’t attend the lectures and the 60% who haven’t done any assessment work…
This week, Optus switches us over to ADSL2 as part of some grand network upgrade. The practical benefit of that is that I get double my old download speed at no extra charge
The catch? I have to have an ADSL2 compatible modem. And the one I got from Optus when I first signed up for their broadband service wasn’t compatible 
So I just got back from the swap meet where I bought myself a shiny new Linksys WAG54G. It’s an ADSL2 modem and wirless router in one. So I can throw out my old DLink modem and router (two seperate devices).
I hope this thing performes better than the DLink, which often overheated.
So far so good.
(Actually, I’m still wrestling with this one.)
The one thing I want to blog here for posterity is some of the settings I needed to get it online. Some of this I found on the Optusnet DSL help page, but the one bit of information that actualy got me online was not on the site. I work it out the old fashioned way by changing one setting at a time, rebooting the modem, and seeing if it worked. So here goes…
Encapsulation is: RFC 2516 PPPoE
Multiplexing is: LLC (This was the main thing. Default wac “VC”, and that didn’t work. The Optusnet site doesn’t mention this one )
Qos type: UBR
Autodetect: disabled
Virtual circuit VPI: 8
Virtual circuit VCI: 35
DSL Modulation: G.dmt (I found this one out by interogating the old dlink modem)
Also, enable Keep Alive. (This doesn’t seem to matter)
After talking to the Linksys tech support people (yes, it came to that), they said to turn down Zonealarm (not off, just down a bit) because the linksys modem has a built in firewall and the two can cause conflicts.
They also suggested setting the MTU value manualy to 1492.
Now I just need to tackle the wirless security. WEP, here I come…