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FIT100 students are expected to have UW accounts on Dante and will use those
accounts for many assignments. Staff or faculty accounts on
Homer can also be used. 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. Class e-mail messages are also available as a Web
archive.
UW computing
labs: locations, hours. The two labs most commonly used by
FIT100 students are the Mary
Gates Hall Computing Resource Center and the Odegaard
Undergraduate Library Computing Commons.
Computing at home
The software used by FIT100 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. 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. For FIT100, the Starter Kit should be all you
need. Both Mac and Windows versions are available.
You should have an up-to-date browser, such as Internet Explorer
6.0 or higher, or Netscape 6.0 or higher. These are available
free on the Web.
To view some of the course files, you need the Adobe
Acrobat Reader, which can be downloaded free.
For programming, we will use Microsoft Visual Basic
6. This software runs only on Windows platforms. The
optional VB textbook comes with a student version of VB on
CD-ROM. The student version can do almost everything needed
for this course. It cannot create executable files, and it is
missing most of the help files.
Students enrolled in this course may be eligible to
download certain Microsoft software products for free, including Visual
Basic (which is a part of Visual Studio). Details forthcoming. The procedure may vary
depending on whether you are registered under CSE or
INFO. Here is some information
for CSE students, at least.
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.
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