SE250:March 12

Agenda

• Review of Lab#2
• Whats an "un-lecture" (for the 13th) and why is there no lecture on the 14th?
• Lab 2 was insanely tedious. Please shorten the next lab. Thank You.
• Are there classes on Thursday? (13th) (got a Ernst & Young recruitment presentation email mentioning no classes on thursday)
• Discussion of possible exemption of Lab 2 from final grade.
• Rules as to where in code local/malloc variables can be declared.

ie, any rules more specific than "not in other code" as we where told last year? Are malloc rules different?

• Where is the hypertextbook?

Minutes

Minute taker: mabd065

Meeting started at 1.06 pm

- The lecturer went over the agenda.

- On Thursday (13th March), the class meeting will be chaired by one of the students.

- There is no lecture on Friday (14th March).

- Students should try to rely on themselves (self teaching type of study).

- Ernst&Young seminar on Thursday 13 March from 11am to noon in room 303S.279 (2nd Floor Seminar Room).

- HTTB (Hyper Text Text Book)

	Should have interactive content including screen casts.

	Other ways of presenting material include diagrams, animations.

	HTTB could also contain examples and exercises.

- Labs will drive the content of the lectures (class meetings).

- 10 Hours expected of student to be spent on SE250 weekly splited as follows:

	4 Hours on Class meetings

	2 hours on Labs

	4 hours on revisions and the HTTB

- Contributions for the HTTB on the wiki are to be co-ordinated.

	For each topic, a chapter must be created and should include some screen casts and other interactive multimedia content.

	The wiki will stay for the whole year online.

	The lecturer will present last year's wiki later in the course.

- Lab review:

Students are expected to work for Two hours. After which they have an option to either carry on or stop. Stopping will not affect the mark they getting for the lab.

- Pointers are really important to understand. They count as a big step above self taught programmers.

- Question regarding the place of declaring variables.

	Gnu & C++ compilers accept declaring variables away from the top.

	Not a Good practice.

	It is better to stick to the standard ANSI C.

	C was designed originally to work with 16K or RAM!!

- Review of areas of memory.

- Pointer of a function is very close to pre-initialized variables.

- Malloc reserves places away further from function & pre-initialized variables' pointers.

- Malloc makes reserving a space for variables safe since it does not allow other software to use the same reserved space.

- Explanations using foo functions given in lab2.

- The PowerPC (Linux) server gave 32bit instead of 64bit because it can cope with 32bits even though it is a 64bits machine.

- OS can cope fine with different bits.

- Compilers can produce different bits size data.

- Compilers arrange memory in a strange way!

- Due to the hardware behaviour, I might read and write to pieces of info even though only one is required.

- Linux might arrange variables differently from a PC.

- Not good to write programmes where we specify where variables should go because these places vary between machines.

- A question was raised regarding string functions.

- Back to foo functions:

	The first 2 functions (foo1 & foo2) are fine and legitimate.

	The third function is not valid since it is returning the address of variable that does not exist anymore.

Meeting finished at about 1.55pm

--Mabd065 14:13, 13 March 2008 (NZDT)