Up to Reid's Home Page

Reid's TA Info Page

This page contains some scripts and other stuff that make my life easier as a TA in the CS department at UMN. Please feel free to use/modify them. If you find these helpful, please drop me a note (reid@reidster.net) and tell me so. :) Constructive criticism and patches are also very welcome.

A note on obsolescence. While the last-modified date below may suggest otherwise, I haven't made any substantive changes to these pages since 2006. I believe there's still useful information here; just be warned that it's not current.

Scripts

• reidsubmit, a user-friendly wrapper around the command-line submit program with some other features to help encourage well-organized submissions by students.
• extract.pl, a program to transform and clean up the submission directory created by the submit tool.
• report_grades.pl, which walks a directory of student work, reporting grades on standard output and (optionally) emailing feedback to student-specified addresses.
• csv2grit.pl, a program which converts CSV-formatted spreadsheet files to GRIT text files. If gnumeric is present, it can convert Excel to CSV automatically as well. Here is an example of the kind of spreadsheet it expects (Excel format).
• upload-grit.sh -- nothing too special, just a little script to upload your GRIT files into GRIT.
• For keeping course web pages up to date, there are a couple of sets of scripts I've developed:
  1. Old way (published web dir is SVN working dir)
     • updatewww.sh. Place in course web directory. This is a wrapper around svn update that sets permissions correctly, which have a tendency to get screwed up in web directories managed by more than one person. Depends on fixperms.pl.
     • fixperms.pl. Place in course web directory. This sets permissions in the directory correctly.
  2. New way (copy files from SVN working dir to web space):
     • publish.sh. Copy files to web space. Depends on the following two items.
     • htmldate.sh. Make sure property svn:keywords is set to Date on all HTML files.
     • fixperms. Set permissions correctly for group-shared or Web directory spaces.

Other

• Advice for TAs. I was on a Q&A panel for TA orientation in August 2005, and this came out of the discussion and my preparations for same.
• ta-feedback.tex, a nicely formatted mid-term feedback form.
• cvs-help.txt, information on using CVS to version-control course web pages. (For new web pages, I strongly suggest using Subversion instead.)
• svn-help.txt, information on using Subversion to version-control course web pages.