Hi, I can't help you if I don't know who you are, but I can confirm that Ass 1 feedback had to be removed to allow Ass2 feedback to be uploaded. Those were Chris' instructions. Not sure why. Can anyone else see their feedback? (Remember, I can't see w...

Hi, That is an excellent question, whose details are mired in politics. Please come and chat with me if you want the complete, messy story. I personally see it the same way you do, but was told that I need to differentiate the units in some way, so I ...

Hi, The first person who responded is entirely on the money in terms of saying what the code you presented actually does. What I think you may be confusing this is is the substitute command s ,. a-zA-Z . which removes everything from the comma so lo...

Hi, That depends on the question. If the question is specifically about Sed or Awk, clearly no. Cheers MichaelW

Hi, If what you're doing is transparent and reasonable, I don't think there should be an issue, but if it looks dodgy the invigilators will call you out. Thankfully, this time round, it's nothing to do with me. I hope you can see the potential for abu...

ANONYMOUS wrote Hi, While this is entirely new territory for me, I think that is pushing it too far. The invigilators really won't be able to tell whether you are chatting with someone (banned), googling (not good, and hopefully won't help) or looking...

ANONYMOUS wrote Hi, That is correct. It's online, so you can be anywhere to do it (just watch out for the timezones ;-) ) Cheers MichaelW

I do hope there are no more (admittedly very late) submissions.

Hi, This time round I've been much more explicit about whether I want, or rather don't want, antibugging. Obviously, this only applies to longer bits of code rather than single lines. Cheers MichaelW

Hi, Just to let you know that I am working my way through the backlog. Each one takes a while to go through in detail to figure out where marks were lost, and then sometimes detailed exchanges that follow. Of course, at that point on the person who s...

Hi, Functions are in the unit and I said everything apart from markdown, so yes, potentially. (I clearly cannot say whether any given thing is, or isn't, in the exam. That aside, a Bash function (which is what I assume you are referring to, is just li...

Hi There is a longer discussion at Monday's lecture, but the short version is that the exam is 1 1 2 hrs, online (LMS) and open book (which means the internet, and especially the man pages). What is not okay is asking friends or copying things you fi...

Hi Hanlin Got it, thanks. All good. Cheers MichaelW

Hi Everyone, It is the Jewish Sabbath (Shabbat). I am now off-line. Get back to you on Sunday. Have a good weekend. Cheers MichaelW

ANONYMOUS wrote The Week 4 script was a good starting point for this assignment, but you need to look at the actual specs and modify it to work with these specs, not the class example. Yes, I did use a number of texts, but Alice was unchanged. Cheers M...

ANONYMOUS wrote Hi, That is not how ranks work. The 3 10's in your example are equal first, and the 9 is fourth. For example, Alice is position 32 or 33 in the ranked list, so I accepted either (seeing I said to pick one). Similarly, in your example,...

Hi Terra There were 12 questions and 16 marks to be distributed so I made Q1, Q2, Q7 and Q9 worth 2; all the rest 1. Daniel and Isaac used the same scheme, but noted down the results differently. For the ones I marked, the tag indicates the number of ...

Hi, Thanks for letting me know. How's it now? M

Hi Terra, I never assumed shell functions (because we did it so late), but if you see my suggested breakdown in Ass2 there are multiple scripts, and I have talked about problem decomposition. Thus, my solution to Ass1 called subsidiary shell scripts. ...

Not so fast ..... Because CITS2003 and CITS4407 are aliased I can't upload marks for feedback. Chris can fix it, but needs to go to a meeting. Should be done by lunchtime. sigh M

Fair enough. In the next hour. M

ANONYMOUS wrote Hi Everyone, While Daniels post at this late stage is a little unhelpful, let's analyse what he said. To recap """ 1 Test to make sure your code it do all the examples shown in the project page. 2 Test your code INSIDE THE DOCKER ENVIRONME...

Hi, That is my hope. I now have marked scripts from Daniel, Isaac and, of course, myself. Now need to do the reconciliation against all the submission to make sure no-one's work fell between the cracks and then process late penalties. Simple, really. C...

Hi, Similarly to contractions (possessives), a compound word must have hyphen between two simple words. (Remember, simple word can have only one letter.) As for having it in the spec, I think (hope) you'll find that they are already in the definitions ...

Hi, No only letters are considered parts of words. Cheers MichaelW PS I really have mentioned this earlier, honest. -)

Hi Terra, For our purposes, "it's" is a possessive under the rules I set up, but 'em and pickin' are just a words (not a contractions) - see previous discussion. As I said, this is a first cut at an NLP task, and while it's interesting how far you can ...

Hi, Yes, I've said in a couple threads that single quotes appearing before or after a word are to be ignored as speech marks, even if you and I know that, in the context, they are actually contractions. That understanding is well beyond this unit, whi...

Hi, The only things that can be regarded as compound words are simple word - simple word) or simple word '- simple word (which is both a contraction AND a compound word). --, ---, ----, are all to be converted to blank. BTW, it is for this reason t...

Hi Peter Done. Thanks for the reminder. I was having way to much fun marking Assignment 1. Cheers MichaelW

No, you won't. It was something I missed. Cheers MichaelW

Hi What happens inside the suite of scripts is entirely up to you, including what they are named. I just need to insist on the name of the top level script so my automarker can call it. Really no different to having an API, and then what happens insi...

Thanks for letting me know. Fixed. Cheers MichaelW

Hi, Each bit answered in situ Cheers MichaelW ANONYMOUS wrote Don't care. No less than 3, please That was affected by a very obscure bug which only occurred when a word, beginning with or (like ordinary) appears in a compound-word, such as "ordinary-sized...

Hi Justin, Anything that needs changed permissions, my autotesting program will will do that, never fear. OTOH, any chmod a user script does is rerouted as potentially dangerous. (That is how the person who set everything in the parent directory to 60...

Hi, I added debugging printing to the tokenizer, and I now see that " 'that's" being rendered as a contraction. The first ' is actually the start of quoted speech so can be ignored. The second ' should be interpreted as a possessive under the rules I...

Hi Alicia Here is my list. BTW. A compound word with 3 hyphenated components only counts as 1 word and 1 compound word. Cheers MichaelW shirt Hyphen sleeves taxi Hyphen drivers blue Hyphen overalled grass Hyphen lawn fresh Hyphen faced pale Hyphen faced well H...

Hi Alicia, I figured out what the difference is. The spec talks about - as a hyphen, between two words. What you have in this text are a couple free-standing hyphens (which should really be em dashes aka hyphen pairs, but here were rendered as singl...

Hi, I've been asked about the extent of commenting I require (and you should routinely do). Comments should be reasonable; A thicket of comments is also bad, obscuring the actual program text. Bottom line is that another programmer should be able to ...

Hi, At least some people seem to be confused about what's to happen with a profile (if one input file) or the pair-wise analysis. What the spec has said is, "If one file is specified, a profile should be created and printed out". I assumed that "print...

Hi Alicia, I checked just now and more-or-less (as a single word text) is indeed counted both as a word and a compound word. " word 1 contraction 0 compound word 1 " It is possible you have an old version of the file in your browser cache. If you reload it...

Hi, As promised in the emails, apart from the 1 question survey of what you'd like me to do in the last week, there will be at least one Q A session. Please just down on this thread anything you'd like me to go over. Cheers MichaelW

Hi Hanlin, Your program should simply print the profile or the comparison of texts, on standard output. I had to give these outputs a name in order to allow the web page to refer to them and thus show you. Cheers MichaelW

Hi Rick, Done. For each of the longer text samples I have now posted the corresponding profiles. Hope that helps. Cheers MichaelW

Hi Hanlin, ) If the user provides 1 text file, your program should return the corresponding profile ) If the user provides 2 text file, your program should compute the two profiles, normalise each, compare the normalised profiles, after which the pr...

Hi Justin, There are 2 instances of "also" in Lawrence, 0 in Lawson. However, when that counts for each profile are normalised (as per the spec), Lawrence goes to 1.52905 . Lawson, of course remains 0. The difference therefore is 1.52905, which when...

Hi, So long as everything you've created is in the zip file, and, of course, you use names consistently, AND the top level name is what I've specified, then all will be well, as it was for the first assignment. Just assume that everything lives in the...

Hi, No, please just print the actual profile, as that is readily checked for small samples. Normalisation only makes sense in the context of comparison. More to the point, normalisation cannot be undone so better to have the original profile. In any ...

Hi Justin (and everyone), I just realised that there were two levels of confusion. Yes, by samples I meant just those snippets. The only example of a full text analysis was the recently added Huckleberry Finn, as requested. However, I think I have now ...

Hi Everyone, While I occasionally get things wrong - and am very appreciative of people who let me know so I can correct things - but this time I really did say, "... What I have also chosen to report is the squares of the style-metric differences,.."...

Hi Peter, If you stick with the formula (which is quite silly in this case) your solution will be the same as (or close to) the sample one. Remember, all standards are equally arbitrary choices, it's just that one that people have agreed to. Think QWE...

Hi Marc, What you may have done, and what I did until Justin pointed it out, is that you've missed the relatively small number of instances where conjunctions are found at the beginning of sentences, and hence capitalised. "And" is the same as "and", ...

Agreed. You count conjunction when they are acting as conjunctions, i.e. on their own. When found as part of compound words, e.g "one-and only", they are just a component of a compound word (which scores 1 word and 1 compound word). Cheers MichaelW

Hi, I'd missed ... (elipsis), but in any case dot is understood as full stop, so looks like we have an empty sentence. Don't worry about it. As I've said elsewhere, I want to keep things sensible. Logically, a dot is only a full-stop if preceded by at...

Hi, Will do. It may have to wait till Monday as it's tricky getting files past the UWA fire-wall. Cheers MichaelW

Hi, Sorry, but with the delay getting the automarking to work (most of which has been spent dealing some truly bizarre code, though I didn't know it at the time sigh ) we're only now really getting into marking. It may done by Monday week, but don't ...

Hi Justin and Matt, To be utterly precise, "pickin'-up" is both a compound word AND a contraction (short form of "picking"). Indeed, what I said in the earlier posting was "1) Well spotted. I think you'll agree that it is an interesting stylistic cho...

ANONYMOUS wrote Hi, Yes, please. Of course, this assignment could equally have been done in, say Python (and was a few years ago), but that not the point of this unit, which is Shell and open source tool scripting. While basic natural language proces...

ANONYMOUS wrote Hi In best academic tradition, the answer is Yes and No (but mostly No). It matters greatly that you use the top level name that I have specified. Thus malaria incidence and common words in the last assignment and style cmp for this a...

No, you have well understood it 99 correctly. The other 1 is the land of the Gotcha. In this case, Yes, the computational complexity is exactly the same. The other 1 is that working in the computer's memory is faster than going out to the long ter...

Hi, The big cost is slurping the lines out of the files, which is slower than having what you need in memory already. What Sed and Awk do is grab a line at a time. Your program can then do whatever with the line, before a new line is obtained. Another...

Hi, Sorry for being unclear. I am only referring to the programs you write. For example, using cut multiple times, as you may have had to do in the last assignment because we'd not covered awk, is very inefficient (which is why efficiency was not ment...

Hi, grepping multiple times, esp if it relates to a file, can be very slow. Clearly the texts of the input files need to be transformed, and doing everything in one scripts is a recipe for disaster. Better a separation of concerns, as suggested by th...

Hi, Clearly, in this tip I'm trying not to be overly specific - it's tip, not an answer - but please look at the word count example that I began the unit with, and then reworked a number of times. That takes text, formatted as words per line and ends ...

Hi Rajwant, Please see the help4407 thread on "Unrecorded lecture" Cheers MichaelW

Yes, word-pair is a compound-word. I use the latter term as there may be more the two words, e.g. one-of-a-kind, so "pair" seemed inappropriate. Cheers MichaelW

Hi Adam What I'll is answer each part next to the question, rather at the end and need to flip back and forth, okay? Double hyphen receives special mention because you genuinely need to deal with hyphen, so you can't simply get rid of it, as you do, fo...

Hi Peter, Done. Or rather, I think it's done. The site is not being served correctly. I assume it'll be okay when the server relaunches. Cheers MichaelW

Hi, Many thanks for taking the trouble to do the example by hand. Long story short. The problem with my code was that the tokenizer looked for the patter " for", not " for ", so forty-five was mis-classified. Fixed. I've uploaded the recomputed data ...

That is correct. Cheers MichaelW

That is correct. You need to count dot, exclamation marks and question marks to count sentences, but you don't need to add any of these, as such, to the profile. This is the opposite of hyphen, where a hyphenated word is counted once as a compound wo...

ANONYMOUS wrote Hi, 1) Well spotted. I think you'll agree that it is an interesting stylistic choice by the author, to indicate very informal speech, e.g. in Children of the Bush. Logically, it's both a contraction and a compound-word, so therefore al...

Hi Georgia, My apologies, but 95 is indeed correct. I posted an update here a short while ago, after I realised that my program did not count the two instances of 'Roo sigh Cheers MichaelW

ANONYMOUS wrote Hi, Well done Sorry that I cannot thank you by name, but, Yes, you are right. My program was not counting the two instances of 'Roo. It now does. I'll shortly upload a new set of example output files. Cheers MichaelW

Hi Peter, Nice one No, I think that'd be one wrinkle too many; "one-and-only" is just added to the word and a compound-word counts. Cheers MichaelW

Hi, My apologies once again for the lectures that failed to be recorded. From the next one I shall also record the MS-Teams broadcast, just to have a backup. At least for the Team meeting recording, if I've forgotten to turn on the mic someone will in...

Hi, I'm working on the automated marking. As much defensive code as as put it turns out not to be quite enough grin . I'm hoping to get that finally going today and will have it distributed by the markers first thing tomorrow. Cheers MichaelW

Hi Terra, When I finally get the automated marking to work (sigh) and the scripts are marked, you will find that each test is listed, together with the output. Cheers MichaelW

Hi, The earlier thread was getting a bit long, and I worried that this posting may be lost. I now am convinced that the 93 words in the update from the other day is correct. I added some debugging to a a version. The debugging prints out the word as w...

Hi Amandeep, A sentence has nothing to do with n, which simply relates to the placement of the lines on the screen. A sentence is a sequence of one or more words ending with a full-stop (dot), exclamation mark or question mark. Cheers MichaelW

Thanks. I also manually counted, but my definitions may have changed in the interim. Seeing a couple people are getting the same result, I have another look tomorrow.

Hi Justin, Again, well spotted Fixed (I believe.) Cheers MichaelW

I have now updated the description of the examples to reflect the new normalisation method. Cheers MichaelW

Hi Yes. From now on I'll do both to avoid this very embarrassing situation recurring. If I fail to turn on the mic for the Team meeting, someone is sure to let me know. Unfortunately, there is no similar notification for the lecture-theatre mic. sig...

ANONYMOUS wrote Hi, That is correct. Over the weekend I was unable to load the revised examples, but that will happen this afternoon. Cheers MichaelW

Hi, This has never happened to me before, but the lecture recording for this lecture - where I largely recapped the previous failed recording - also failed. I really am sorry. MichaelW

Hi Michael. Is it possible to release the test cases that will be used to mark project 1 so we can play around ourselves, once people with special considerations submit everything? I personally find it very helpful in terms of learning, and understan...

Hi, That is correct. Please see the text in the spec about double hyphen being different from hyphen. Cheers MichaelW

Hi, Anonymous is fine. I'd rather you post anonymously than not at all Re the date due, it is the Monday of Week 12. I could make it a little later that week, but clearly no further because unless there is no exam, assessment cannot extend past the e...

Hi Justin Good question. Of course you are right, but for the purposes of this assignment 's will only be a possessive, please. To go beyond that would entail part-of-speech tagging and linguistic analysis, which is very interesting, but WELL beyond t...

Hi, Just to let you know that today's recording has no sound. With all that is going on in the unit I don't have time to record a new version, so I'll briefly recap the content next class. As it was I didn't complete the material, so will also use the t...

There was meant to be. Thanks for letting me know. Confusion, I expect. My apologies otherwise; I believed we had it covered. Cheers MichaelW

Hi, Just a reminder that for the time being (so probably to the end of the unit), all labs are on-line. While restrictions have formally eased, the incidence of Covid19 is increasing. Sitting in a lab for 2hrs with someone who probably does not Covid, b...

Hi James, If the "do" was below the "for" there is no need of a semicolon (which is how I set it out in my examples). When it's on the same line it gets confused as to whether the do is actually one of the things the for loop is iterating over. I the...

Hi, Given that it will be marked by a human, I don't think it matters either way. It goes into the realms of bells and whistles, which are no substitute for solid code doing the job. However, if your code is solid, then like the proverbial chicken sou...

(This got tagged to the wrong thread )

Hi, I understand some of you have been finding the first assignment a stretch, and are uncomfortable with the ambiguity of tests you've not seen. I do get that, so believe I should say something about why it is that I'm doing what I'm doing. My view is...

Hi, Given that these are very common words in real texts, they are only capitalised at the starts of sentences. And rarely appears at the start of a sentence, for example. In other words, it doesn't much matter. FWIW, I don't change the capitalisation...

Hi, Yes, title case.py will remain being called title case.py. Doing anything else would be slightly perverse, no? ;-) (I'm really not that bad.) Cheers MichaelW

Hi, As far as Bash and Unix are concerned, the suffix is irrelevant. Ditto any Shell or other scripts you use within your overall program. However, the top level names have to be precisely the ones specified in the spec; otherwise my testing script wil...

BTW, also in response to a question raised at today's lab session, I'll begin Monday's lecture with a comparison of Shell for and while loops, which you use and why. Have a good weekend Cheers MichaelW

Hi, Just to let you know that I have posted an updated version of title case.py, which deals with the issue of hypenated names not being capitalised correctly. Before this, Timor-Leste was converted to Timor-leste, which is clearly not correct. That def...

Hi, First off, please bear in mind that everything in brackets can be ignored (and Sudan, given the ambiguity about which Sudan we're talking about). The truth is that this is intended as a Shell programming exercise, not real data-science. The teachi...

Hi, Let's keep it simple. Just return one of them. (No problem if you return of the equal best.) Cheers MichaelW

Hi, I will only use the existing text, not contractions, which would be unfair. I also said to please ignore Sudan, as it's genuinely ambiguous, and assume that anything in brackets can be ignored. After using the helper program to deal with capitals ...

Hi Everyone, There is no "Chat with Camillo", or rather, there was, but it was meant to be a private chat with Camillo, in this case online, rather than in my office, as you all can do. Unfortunately, it was yet another Teams gotcha, and the invitatio...

Hi, I am not suggesting that you use cat -vet to remove the non-ASCII characters; it was just my way of showing that they are present. There is another Unix command which I have used several times (likely you too) that will do the trick rather more si...

Most of the issues will disappear if use the Python program I created. However, Viet Nam Vietnam will required special handing, as both are widely used names of that country. Cheers MichaelW

Hi, While the spec could have said most common word across all the file taken together, i.e. in effect one large corpus, the spec actually wants to have the Nth most common word across the largest number of files, so if N 5 and "a" appears in position...

Hi, Without looking at your code (which would be unethical in these circumstances) it's hard to know, but things I can suggest are ) Did you translate upper case to lower case, as in the lectures. The assignment spec says not to. ) It is possible it ...

Hi Chuanhe, Then you need to start the docker app (if you've not already done so) and use the docker run command (modified for your directory structure). If all that works you will be running a Linux instance in which Python is available and the progr...

Hi Marc, The second part will inevitably be slower. In the first part you are traversing one file of 2,500 lines. For the second part you are traversing multiple, say 10, files with a total of 95,000 lines of text. Please don't get too fixated on spe...

Hi, I have now uploaded the marks for Test1 to csmarks https secure.csse.uwa.edu.au run csmarks What you will find is your mark for Test1 and its contribution to 20 of the final mark (called OVERALL). In addition seeing your own mark, if you click on ...

Hi Terra, Sure. The long and the short of it is that if you have it in same directory as the data, and assuming '.' is on you PATH then you call it like any other Unix program. (It may require chmod). Cheers MichaelW

Hi, Just to let you know that we have secured the services of Isaac Bergl to look after the Tuesday and Wednesday labs. My apologies for today's lab; that fell between the cracks, but Isaac will be starting tomorrow (Wed 27th). Just to record my thank...

Hi Chuanhe, The Window's environment won't know what to make of the file. You need to put it in the directory that maps to perm when you run docker. Then the docker instance will see it, and will be able to handle it. Cheers MichaelW

ANONYMOUS wrote If you are on an older MacBook, Bash is the default shell when you use the Terminal command. Newer models use Zsh, which is very much like bash. There are some differences with the various commands, but the differences, if present, a...

Hi, First off, just to let you know that I have updated the Assignment 1 spec to include all the clarifications I have made via help4470 to the spec, so you can have them all in one place. BTW, what it also illustrates is the necessity of data-cleanin...

Hi Marc, Better not to add the text files because of the space that will consume across all the people in the class. I will be using my own versions of the incidenceOfMalaria.csv and the text files, so it makes no difference whether you include your o...

Hi Terra, Yes. The open question is whether they are face to face. The other piece of news is that Ryan has resigned from lab demonstrating, so we are currently short-handed. I'll post something about that in a few minutes. Yet another wrinkle in a un...

Hi, One thing that immediately follows from my saying that bracketed stuff should be ignored, Sudan is genuinely ambiguous, as there is inconsistency in the data whichever way you turn. Let's agree to set that one aside. Cheers MichaelW

Hi Rashmi, I'll reply to each question in turn. A sensible rule is that if that can be done unambiguously, then the contraction is okay. Emirates is a very good example, as that is how they are commonly known in English. Viet Nam Vietnam was mentione...

Hi Daniel That is correct. Cheers MichaelW

ANONYMOUS wrote While logically a hyphenated word-pair logically counts as a single word, for our purposes this time round, I'll keep the definition of a word to simply be what I've been using in the lectures an alphabetic, followed by zero or more ot...

Hi, In response to the questions on help4407 regarding how to handle capitalisation in country names, I have created a small program to deal with that. You can find the new helper program linked to the Assignment 1 page (which is linked to the Weekly...

Hi Hanlin, Greetings from Kalgoorlie. Clearly, Viet Nam and Vietnam are the same place, and it would be incorrect and unhelpful to say that the data is not found in the dataset. Clearly, your program will need to do some data cleaning up front on the co...

ANONYMOUS wrote Hi, This code was in a file, where 1 - the first argument - is the name of a directory. ' ' matches anything, so .py matches any file that has suffix .py . So, for i in 1 .py is a loop where variable i is given the names of all the...

ANONYMOUS wrote

ANONYMOUS wrote Hi, The whole point about anti-bugging is foremost, to let the user know that there is a problem, and then do something sensible. For example if N is larger than the number of words, it won't be found. Say something. This relates to th...

Ignoring the g at the end of the command, the command will substitute the first instance from the list of characters encountered in the text with the replacement character. The g means it will happen for every instance. Cheers MichaelW

ANONYMOUS wrote Hi, I think we can agree that you can't simply do nothing. So, with all potential errors, the first requirement is that you spot the error and let the user know that something is not right. If you can sensibly proceed, then let the user...

ANONYMOUS wrote Hi, That depends on the Part you are tackling. For the second part, the spec says a directory is expected as the second argument. Cheers MichaelW

Hi Bryan, Seeing that is the format that the data as downloaded uses, that is the format I'll be using for testing. Cheers MichaelW

ANONYMOUS wrote Hi, Greetings from Kalgoorlie. That is surprising. To inject a little precision into the discussin grin you can use the built-in Bash command time, to account for how much time a command actually takes. On my mid 2016 MacBook Pro, ti...

ANONYMOUS wrote Hi, The example you give is where the code would not run. That is a another matter entirely. What happens in that case is that if the marker can see a ready solution, then they'll implement the fix, run the code against the tests, but ...

Hi, Just something you may find useful. When you are testing your program, you can sometimes get lost in all the stuff that the program is printing out. Debugging echo statements are definitely useful (and recommended), but you can end up drowning as th...

ANONYMOUS wrote Hi, 1) We will be using precisely that file, called by that name. Given that the data is unique, there is no point making the name of input file a parameter 2) Except for a little cleaning (mostly related to using integer data), the fil...

Hi Terra, For your development, just download a copy of the file. You can assume that the file (with precisely that name), will be in the same directory as the script. Given that this is a unique data file, there is no point making the file name a param...

Hi With today's lecture you now have what you need to do both parts of the assignment. Good luck. So, whatever you are now celebrating, or will shortly be celebrating Happy Easter Ramadan Kareen Chag Sameach And whether you are celebrating something ar...

Hi Hanlin, Fixed. Thanks for letting me know. The correct name is "common words". Cheers MichaelW

Hi Hanlin All the links on the left hand side of the page have now been fixed. Thanks for letting me know. Cheers MichaelW

Hi Hanlin Great question. Yes, please, preserve the upper or lower case of the letters, but, as before, only sequences of 1 or more letter can make up words. Thanks for pointing this out. I shall change the spec tomorrow. Cheers MichaelW

Hi Everyone, I have updated the Assignment 1 web page to add some examples of the programs in action. Please get back to me if anything is unclear, or needs expanding. Cheers MichaelW

Hi everyone, While the system is set up for you to post anonymously, and there are circumstances where you may be more comfortable doing that, why not own the sensible questions you are asking. I much prefer talking to a real person; I suspect Ryan fe...

ANONYMOUS wrote Hi, For example, across the 10 files in the Gutenberg sample, "the" is the most common word in 9 of them, but "I" is the most common word in the 10th. For -nth 2, the most common across the 10 files is "and", with 5 hits. Makes sense? Ch...

The exit status is precisely that; did the program successfully complete (i.e. get to the end without having some function fail). In a sense, that is not the same as complete successfully (ie do something sensible). By antibugging you are, in effect, ...

Hi Ashley, Ryan is, of course, absolutely right; they do identical things and it's a matter of style. Here is why I make the choices I do ) I prefer usr bin env bash (in this case, python, whatever) because it relies on exactly one program being w...

Hi, It just occurred to me, given the odd questions I have been receiving, that when I say that the material covered in the test includes L1-L8 plus part of L9, I want to emphasise that that includes the demo. There demos were part of those lectures, a...

Hello Michael, I just want to double check about the material for the tomorrow test. The test will contains L1 to L8 including shell arithmetic part from L9 and lab 1 to lab 4 (i.e. from week 2 to week 5). Thank you. That is correct

ANONYMOUS wrote Hi, It just tells the Shell how to interpret the script; by default ordinary Shell is used, not Bash (I believe). Either way, it s good to be explicit about it. Cheers MichaelW

Hi, There are a couple possible explanations. The first is that, as well as bin bash at the start, you also need to made the file executable i.e. chmod u x days (or chmod 700 days). The other possibility is that the shell doesn't know where to look...

Hi, This query came to me via Daniel Smith. People who have been watching carefully as it did my demos have noticed that at times I have typed on a new line. My apologies; it is rather useful, but also rather obscure (though covered in your introduct...

ANONYMOUS wrote Hi, As someone else has pointed out more recently, we use stderr in order to keep error messages, status updates, etc (i.e. not directly relevant to the purpose of the program) away from the program outputs that you, presumably, are inte...

Hi, While lecturers are professionally coy answering questions about coming exams, and always feign forgetfulness grin , the most truthful answer I can give right now is I don't know. In all the years I've been lecturing, I've never set an open book e...

Hi, The report for our little survey of when to release lab solutions is attached. Largest number were for week after. Cheers MichaelW

Hi Everyone, You know how your mother (or your lab instructor, etc) insist that you need to tidy up after yourself? You may notice that the little program I created failed to do that, and left stuff lying around. What more did I need to add to the code?...

Hi Michael, That is correct. As an educator, it is tempting to make the labs assessable, to ensure that people give them a try. OTOH, I believe there needs to be a "safe-place" in the unit where you can make a total mess of question and get help, without...

Hi, I've been asked to release the answers to the labs. My inclination is to unhide the answers the week after the corresponding lab, the idea being to give you a genuine opportunity to try doing them yourself (In my experience, having the answers right...

Hi, Done. I was asked during the last class to make slides available before the lectures, rather than after. I have now set this us for the next couple of lectures (and posted yesterday's, of course). The point I made to the people I was chatting with, w...

Hi That s because the slides are being posted to the unit web page https teaching.csse.uwa.edu.au units CITS4407 (click the Weekly Schedule tab on the left). I only use LMS as a way of ) posting Announcements (which you can back to later), ) acce...

No, the University, most unhelpfully, includes in the timetable all the slots that we might have used; not those actually being used. Mon 8am was available for a while before the start of semester, but as there were only a few takers it was deemed u...

ANONYMOUS wrote Hi, All the labs are currently online due to capacity limits applying the F2F labs. I hope that will change soon. When it does, the F2F labs will be F2F only; the online labs will continue being online. Just before noon I posted an ann...

ANONYMOUS wrote Hi, Done. Cheers MichaelW

Hi, A few people have asked me about a Week 3 test quiz. There is no week 3 quiz. If you find that page, you are looking at an old version of the unit. Please review the first lecture, L0 for details about this year s unit. There will be a test in We...

Hi, Welcome to help4407, which is in effect also help2003. help4407 is intended to be the informal counterpart to the more formal announcements that I post via LMS announcements. More importantly, you are able to respond to posts or post your own queries...