Your UWNetID account

Students in this course are expected to have UW accounts on Dante and will use those accounts for many assignments. Staff or faculty accounts on Homer may also be used. For information about obtaining and managing a UWNetID account, see the UW Computing and Networking home page.

All class e-mail will be sent to those accounts. If you normally read e-mail on an ISP or through some other connection, you may wish to have your UW e-mail forwarded there. Once you have a UWNetID, it's easy to set up mail forwarding using the services at Manage Your UW NetID Resources.

Computing at the UW

The UW provides numerous labs around campus (locations). Some of them are general access and others are offered by specific departments and may have access restrictions.

The two labs most commonly used by students in this class are the Mary Gates Hall Computing Resource Center and the Odegaard Undergraduate Library Computing Commons.

Computing at Home

The software used in this class runs on Windows PCs. In some, but not all cases, versions may be available for Mac or Linux systems. The closer your home PC is to the Windows PCs in the labs, the less likely you are to have problems. You are not required to work on UW computers, but course staff can provide only limited assistance in debugging problems with home computers.

UW provides software for making secure remote connections to Dante. All the tools you need are contained in the UWICK Connectivity Kit, a CD-ROM available for purchase at the Bookstore. You can also download the essential programs (the "Starter Kit") for free. Both Mac and Windows versions of the Starter Kit are available.

You should have an up-to-date version of a modern browser such as Microsoft Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, or Opera. These browsers are available free on the Web. I recommend Firefox.

To view some of the course files, you need the Adobe Acrobat Reader, which can be downloaded for free.

For programming, we will use JavaScript to produce dynamic HTML. Your programming efforts will be published to your Dante Web account.

Students enrolled in this course may be eligible to download certain Microsoft software products for free. The procedure may vary depending on whether you are registered under CSE or INFO. The software you download may be used for academic, non-commercial purposes only.

In the labs, we will use Adobe Photoshop for some exercises. This software is expensive to buy. You can do what you need to with a number of other free or inexpensive tools, such as Microsoft Paint, Microsoft Photo Editor, Kodak Imaging, etc. You may also find that your word processor (e.g. Word) or presentation software (e.g. PowerPoint) has some image processing software built in.

The last part of the quarter studies Databases and uses Microsoft Access as the tool.  All labs on campus have it.  The standard MS Office Suite does not come with Access. If you wish to purchase a copy, the cost is roughly $100.