Tuesday, September 29, 2020

Hello CMSE802,

I thought class went well today. We will continue with examples of web scraping on Thursday. This is a fun assignment and I hope everyone can make it to class. This weeks videos are as follows:

Let me know if you need anything,

  • Dirk

Thursday, September 24, 2020

Hello CMSE802 Students,

I just posted the pre-class and in-class assignments for next week. I also posted a PREVIEW assignment that I was planning for the middle of November. This PREVIEW includes some more videos about the HPCC and how to get Anaconda installed to work with the new Jupyter OnDemand interface. It would be great if some/all of you give it a try and get back to me. I know we can get it working but I may need to practice debugging it with some of you.

The videos from class are now are posted on the website and are linked to here. Sorry that these are much longer than usual. I had a harder time splitting up the topics:

Take care and have a wonderful weekend.

  • Dirk

Wednesday, September 23, 2020

Dear CMSE802 students,

The engineering jupyterhub server has been getting much higher user load this semester and many students are reporting problems. In response, the Department of Engineering Computer Services (DECS) has put together a new jupyterhub server which should be much more responsive. Since a major learning goal in this course is “testing” and “debugging” I volunteered our class to beta-test this new server. From now on, please use the following URL if you need to log into jupyterhub:

http://jupyterhub2.egr.msu.edu

Since this is a new system, there is a possibility that some things are broken. Please let DECS and me know as soon as you see any problems by emailing jupyterhub@egr.msu.edu and cc me at colbrydi@msu.edu. We can still always move back to the old server if you need to get some work done.

Let me know if you have any other comments, questions or concerns.

Take care,

  • Dirk

Tuesday, September 22, 2020

Hello CMSE802 students,

I thought today's class went well. I like more hands on practice and less me talking at my computer. Here are the videos from today for your reference:

Remember your project proposals are do at the end of the week.

See you on Thursdays,

  • Dirk

Thursday, September 17, 2020

Hello CMSE802 students,

Remember that your Optimization reports are due to be pushed to your git repository tomorrow.

I just finished posted assignments for class next week. I ended up cutting quite a bit of my own debugging. The following are just the parts on LSF.

I spent quite a bit of time trying to get conda environments working in jupytehrub. Unfortunately, this was a lot harder than I had hoped. I managed to create a default environment but as soon as I installed numpy it broke. I did a lot of Googling and our problem seems to be unique. I think something is wrong with how jupyterhub is set up and I will need to talk to the system administrators to track down and fix the problem.

For now, please figure out how to use environments on your local machine. Let me know if you have problems and I can work with you to find a fix or a work around.

Please let me know if you have any comments, questions or concerns.

Take care and have a wonderful weekend.

  • Dirk

Tuesday, September 15, 2020

Hello CMSE802 students,

Here are the videos from class today:


Thursday, September 10, 2020

Hello CMSE802 students,

Sorry for babbling in class all day. I hope I was able to answer your questions. I just fixed the broken Youtube video in the GIT-Init assignment and pushed my changes. You should be able to do a "git pull" and watch the video.

Remember, the GIT-Init assignment is due tomorrow (Friday Sept 11, 2020)!

As a reference, here are some videos from class today. I split them up into bite-sized chunks hoping it will make it easier for you to consume:

I also pushed all of next weeks assignments so feel free to get started when you have time in your schedule. Have a wonderful weekend and see all of you on Tuesday.

Take care,

  • Dirk

Tuesday, September 8, 2020

Hello CMSE802 students,

I think the second day of class went well. Unfortunately, zoom was being helpful and recorded all of the student videos along side my own. I mistakenly tried a new option and I did not realize it broke my settings. I went though and edited the video but some of the words are cut off. I also left in first names, I figure that first names and no faces should not be a problem but please let me know if you are uncomfortable with this and I will fix it.

Here is the edited video

Here is a link to the course pre-class Google slides document I plan to use all semester. Please bookmark this for future reference:

Google Slides

At the end of class we also did an example simple wave equation model. We will cover this again later in the semester but I remembered to hit record so here is me talking a bit about this model.

Link to Wave Equation Example

Let me know if you have any comments, questions or concerns.

  • Dirk

Thursday, September 3, 2020

First pre-class assignment

Hello CMSE802 students,

Thank you for your patience working with me to get the kinks out of this online course. I hope you are at least starting to get a feeling for what is expected for the semester. Do not worry if things are still a little confusing. We have plenty of time to figure out how to get the most out of the experience. If you were not able to make it to class today here is a video to what we covered:

Link to Sept 3, 2020 class video

For next week, I would like everyone to work on the pre-class assignments. These assignments have been uploaded into the course git repository. Normally I would have you all just issue a "git pull" command but you haven't learned that command yet. You could just give it a try. Another option is you could try just deleting the folder we downloaded during class and do a "git clone" again. Try that too.

If you are confused by git (understandable because we haven't covered it yet) then you can just download the files directly using the following links:

If you have any trouble I encourage you to join our #cmse802-F20 channel on the CMSE-courses slack group. You should be able to join up by following this link:

You are also welcome to send me an email if you have any questions regarding anything to do with class.

Take care,

  • Dirk

Monday, August 31, 2020

Welcome to CMSE802

Hello CMSE802 students,

I am excited to be teaching CMSE802 this Fall and look forward to meeting all of you in class this week. Detailed information about the course, including the syllabus, schedule and assignments can be found on the course website (Bookmark this page!):

We will be using Jupyter notebooks for quite a bit of our student/instructor communication. Please come to class with the latest version of Anaconda Python installed (Anaconda includes Jupyter). Instructions for installing and using Anaconda and Jupyter can be found here:

This semester we will be teaching using a remote/synchronous teaching model. This means class will meet at the designated time on the schedule. During class, the instructor will also be broadcasting the lecture for you to log-in and participate remotely and the zoom session will also be recorded/edited and posted on-line for asynchronous review. Please use the following zoom url when attending class:

All students will be expected to participate in class activities for which there will also be asynchronous options if you are in a different time zone or are having temporary technical issues. However, the easiest way to ensure getting credit for participation is to attend class live. I will need a sufficient number of students to engage in the live discussion in order for everyone to get the most out of the activities. If this becomes a problem we may need to revisit class policies later in the semester.

If you have any questions about CMSE802, please do not hesitate to contact your section instructors listed in the syllabus on the course website.

Take care,

  • Dr. Dirk Colbry