CP2377 Portable Programming

• Course material:

  • 2007v2 is for use at Townsville and Cairns in 2007.

  • 2007v2 notes errata and general updates:
    • Language Overviews: There are some good language overviews at wikipedia, which will be linked into the next release of the subject materials: Bourne shell; PHP; python (programming language).
      August 2008: PHP and MySQL Web Development, by Luke Welling and Laura Thomson, now has a 4th edition (July 25, 2007). ISBN-10: 0672329166; ISBN-13: 978-0672329166.
    • Files backup onto flash memory sticks: To move files between flash memory on a PC (either on or off campus) and your UNIX home directory on server manning or dunk (or any other UNIX host with ssh installed), use winSCP.
    • Remote X windows logins: Some labs contain sample ssh commands that allow remote unix login with X-windows serving. Recently, the command switches to allow full remote windows serving changed. Any example commands such as ssh -X should now be ssh -Y. (site updated 14/3/2007)
    • Week 4 lab worked example: Added an example of running the final script, and improved highlighting of all sample command lines (made them appear bold in contrast to the output from the script). My examples of running scripts show bash used instead of sh because my host system didn't have a POSIX compliant shell. (site updated 24/3/2007)
    • Week 5 tute: adduser script with alternative highlighting - HTML, PDF. (site updated 30/3/2007)
    • Additional on-line resources for UNIX shell: the O'Reilly UNIX CD Bookshelf includes material on shell programming from Unix Power Tools.
    • Week 8 and assignment 2: rewritten. (site updated 29/4/2007 with direct entry in the schedule to ass.2)
    • New item for resources page 2008: The May/June 2007 issue of Computing in Science and Engineering, features Python (published by the IEEE Computer Society and the American Institute of Physics). See various article abstracts and, in particular, the on-line article Python for Scientific Computing by Travis E. Oliphant, Computing in Science & Engineering, vol. 9, no. 3, May/June 2007, pp. 10-20.
    • New resources items: the PHP section now has a handy HTML summary, the Python section now has a great new reference card, and there are now links to language overviews from wikipedia for {sh, PHP, python, PERL, lua, ruby}.

  • 2007v3...
    (a) Consider use of either opensolaris.org or Nexenta as a convenient source of Solaris with pre-built packages (see also opensolaris kits).
    (b) Try to persuade students to better use software development tools such as language aware editors (see also xkcd take on this).
    (c) Outline some (currently semi-obvious) possibilities for future development. I'm still in favour of having python as the finale.

  • Python ... the movie. A student project that developed a movie about python led to the python introduction/promotion movie posted at http://www.python.org/other/python.mov with this local copy (72MB). Source: the marketing python lists had postings (1,2) announcing this edited version and the right to use; the original can be found at http://www.pythonology.com/links.
    Python Movie Warning: there is a cringe-making comment about programmers ruling the world by someone who, apparently, thinks this is a bad thing. Otherwise, the movie does offer insight into the flexibility of this very useful language.

• Some interesting projects using python and the very popular (and effective) ATMEL micro-controllers for cycle displays: SpokePOV Kit, MiniPOV.

• History: this is the cp2377 proposal.