In which I lament about catchup lectures
Technical, School ·Thursday February 12, 2009 @ 23:46 EST (link)
One-year anniversary of joining CLAMS.
Class tonight was more interesting (and more helpful for the current assignment) than it had been. The professor, Dan Grossman, is excellent and it's evident that he's taken a lot of time to prepare; he has a great set of slides (PowerPoint) each time and is easy to understand and good at explaining the material, but the material wasn't all that interesting for the first few weeks; it was material that people should have learned in undergrad, or things that people should have been able to quickly grok by reading the OCaml manual.
My expectations for a graduate-level course are that readings such as the OCaml manual or any necessary catchup (like Backus-Naur Form) should be specifically or generally assigned (generally, as in "You need to know X, Y, and Z, go learn about it from whatever source you like"). Some of these are as prerequisites: surely it's reasonable to expect that candidates have some sort of scientific undergraduate degree or at least a good background, and the intelligence to read and absorb material. In class, I expect the instructor to go over less obvious things that can't be gleaned simply by reading, or to go over things at a higher level, and, given that this teacher says attendance is important, some interaction to make it worth showing up rather than just watching the recorded lectures the next day. (Which has been true for all but the first few lectures. I wrote some of that early in the course.)
I had a bit of trouble getting my laptop connected to the network (several weeks back when I first attempted it); I had connected it in my office so that I could get the wireless certificates, and that seemed to work (at one point I'd turned off the wireless by mistake using the front switch); I needed to be logged on to the work (REDMOND) domain account for the (MSFTWLAN) certificate to be useful. To be able to reach the Internet I needed to install the ISA ("Internet Security and Acceleration") Firewall Client (from the internal "products" site); after installing it, ping and SSH work.
