Excuse me, Sir !!!
Today, I had a great chance to teach some students at PESIT college in Bangalore. I got a wonderful opportunity to teach Socket Programming to a group of 10, 7th Semester Engineering students. I had a tough time preparing the content to be spoken there. Luckily the slides were in place but werent much useful as a study material since they only had some place holders and no long sentences in them. Dug up some old links and took a lot of help from friends and spent a couple of hours studying late night as if it were my exam in the morning. Reminded me about all those night outs we had in college time :-)
I had a cab booked to pick me up from home, and was half an hour before time at the college. College was buzzing with activity and it felt like it was already 12 in the noon. Checked the watch and it was just 9 !!! No wonder, I feel so lonely in office when i reach there at 9 ;-)
Unfortunately, "my students" had to attend some written test for a company that had come to their campus and most of them could not make it. There were close to 25 who were expected and only 10 turned up. The class kick started very well. To break the ice, I asked them all to write a simple C program to open a text file and print the first and the last 5 characters in it. Was planning to use this in the later half of the session, but it just flew out of my mind later in the day.
Observed the approach and some practises they were following and used these observations to explain them the necessity of writing meaningful variable names, having good coding styles, spending good time on designing their code, to make note and understand the assumptions that go with every single piece of code that is written in this world, blah blah ...
Spent another 45 minutes talking about the overall reasons for having socket programming and giving them a broad level picture of why and what of socket programming. Was actually surprised to know that none of them had ever tried their hands at socket programming !!! It just blew away all the preparation that i had done assuming that these guys would be all experts in socket programming already and would want to learn about some real life examples and pitfalls in socket programming. But, had to change the strategy and concentrate more on giving the theory and talk a lot about the philosophy behind socket programming.
After listening to me patiently for close to 90 minutes, we had a small tea break, and later on resumed the session by writing a small client that would connect to "www.google.com " and print whether the connection was a success or a failure. While testing this client, we figured out that the proxy for the LAN in the lab was down and we had to abundon this program.
I moved onto server side programming and explained them about it. By then, it was already more than 150 minutes since they were bearing me speak. And I realised that they started percieving not to be speaking about socket programming but rather uttering some english sentences which just bounced back the moment they reached anywhere near their ears. I didnt feel like torturing them anymore and we called it a day at around 1 in the noon.
They were so courteous to me that they arranged me some lunch and were insisting on addressing me as "Sir", no matter what I say, and I stopped resisting it and started enjoying it. :D
I had a cab booked to pick me up from home, and was half an hour before time at the college. College was buzzing with activity and it felt like it was already 12 in the noon. Checked the watch and it was just 9 !!! No wonder, I feel so lonely in office when i reach there at 9 ;-)
Unfortunately, "my students" had to attend some written test for a company that had come to their campus and most of them could not make it. There were close to 25 who were expected and only 10 turned up. The class kick started very well. To break the ice, I asked them all to write a simple C program to open a text file and print the first and the last 5 characters in it. Was planning to use this in the later half of the session, but it just flew out of my mind later in the day.
Observed the approach and some practises they were following and used these observations to explain them the necessity of writing meaningful variable names, having good coding styles, spending good time on designing their code, to make note and understand the assumptions that go with every single piece of code that is written in this world, blah blah ...
Spent another 45 minutes talking about the overall reasons for having socket programming and giving them a broad level picture of why and what of socket programming. Was actually surprised to know that none of them had ever tried their hands at socket programming !!! It just blew away all the preparation that i had done assuming that these guys would be all experts in socket programming already and would want to learn about some real life examples and pitfalls in socket programming. But, had to change the strategy and concentrate more on giving the theory and talk a lot about the philosophy behind socket programming.
After listening to me patiently for close to 90 minutes, we had a small tea break, and later on resumed the session by writing a small client that would connect to "www.google.com " and print whether the connection was a success or a failure. While testing this client, we figured out that the proxy for the LAN in the lab was down and we had to abundon this program.
I moved onto server side programming and explained them about it. By then, it was already more than 150 minutes since they were bearing me speak. And I realised that they started percieving not to be speaking about socket programming but rather uttering some english sentences which just bounced back the moment they reached anywhere near their ears. I didnt feel like torturing them anymore and we called it a day at around 1 in the noon.
They were so courteous to me that they arranged me some lunch and were insisting on addressing me as "Sir", no matter what I say, and I stopped resisting it and started enjoying it. :D