CS371p Spring 2022: Week 3

What did you do this past week?

Before the snow days, I mostly worked on assignments in Networks (dig) and Data Mining (Data prep), and I started a little bit of Collatz. It was my first week back in Austin, so I got to meet with my friends as well as play some ping pong. I also watched a good amount of the show “Crash Landing on You”.

What’s in your way?

During these past few days, I felt really sick with a tremendously bad headache which made it hard to get any work done. I tested negative for Covid, but I still had a rough time, and I’m still recovering. On top of that, the recent boil notice in Austin has also been somewhat bothersome, and it doesn’t help that the weather outside has not been the most welcoming.

What will you do next week?

I will continue to work on and finish up Collatz before the deadline and hopefully get an earlier start on the next assignment where we can work in pairs. I will also start working on the next Data Mining assignment on Decision Trees and start reading up about the Transport Layer in Networks.

What did you think of Paper #3: Continuous Integration?

The paper provided amazing insight as to why the need for continuous integration exists and some of the principles behind successfully applying a CI workflow. The paper was somewhat out of date regarding some of the technologies mentioned (which is understandable considering when it was written), but it was nonetheless a very informative read. It was important to note that CI only truly works with good tests, so I am interested in understanding how to test more complex programs like web applications.

What was your experience of UnitTests, Coverage, and IsPrime?

I was already familiar with unit testing so it was nice to see it being used in practice with the first assignment. I had a vague idea of what test coverage was, but I had never seen it in use or understood its utility. But now I see how important it is, as even if you have good unit tests, you may not be testing the part of code that is faulty. IsPrime was an interesting exercise, and I have seen the square root optimization in the past.

What made you happy this week?

I got to be part of a surprise birthday party we threw for one of my friends, and it was really fun and wholesome. I continued to make progress on my language learning goals, and I saw some great dog videos on Instagram, which would surely make anyone happy.

What’s your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week?

If you tend to SSH into UT machines a lot through the terminal and you don’t want to type in the long command including the Linux hostname every time, there is a nice configuration you can do.

Go to ~/.ssh/config, and open the file in a text editor. Then, you can add an entry like:

Host ut
  HostName <UTCS Linux hostname>
  User <UTCS username>

for example:

Host ut
  HostName crux.cs.utexas.edu
  User kaustub

then, instead of having to type

ssh kaustub@crux.cs.utexas.edu

you can type

ssh ut

It’s a nice little configuration if you work in Vim, for example, on the lab machines. Of course you could just use a bash alias, but this is a nice way to do it, especially if you tend to SSH into several different hosts. If you use VS Code, you could also use the Remote SSH extension.