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To get an account on electron for use in the class project, you must do two things:
To make sure that you have a webmail account on the University of Windsor's webmail system at http://webmail1.uwindsor.ca/ before the date on which class accounts will be made - September 25th. If your webmail account is working and accessable, and you are registered in the course, then your account on electron will be created automatically, using the userid and password from your webmail account. If you have not set up your webmail account, no account will be created for you until after you have created the webmail account, and confirmed it's creation to the professor. Passwords on the class server are synchronized with the University's main accounts once per hour, so if you have just changed your password, it may take a short period before it updates on the class server.
Please make sure you test your account well before the due date! Accounts are sometimes shut down over the summer months without your knowing, and assuming your account is still there when it may not be can lead to problems!
Don't! In the past there have been too many problems with FTP uploads, and due to this and security issues, there is no longer an FTP server on the class webserver. Use SSH to upload your files.
A version of SSH for windows has been made available and licensed for members of the University to use. You can obtain it from the University's download directory at http://www.uwindsor.ca/softwareDepot/.
This copy of SSH will allow you to easily log in to and/or transfer files to and from the class server, without needing to worry about a firewall password. Please make sure you download the "Non Commercial Version", not the Evaluation version, which will only work for 30 days.
Apple's OS X and Linux systems come with an SSH client already built in, so you do not need to download one for you Apple or Linux computer.
Occasionally, your files will need their permissions adjusted to make
them readable to the web server - to do this, you need to log into the
server with SSH, and use the text interface mode to type in the following
command:
chmod a+r *
You will need to do this if your web page appears as either a "404: Forbidden" warning page, or an error page which complains about "Permission denied".
Windows users can obtain the SSH program from the University of Windsor's software depot. Linux and OS X users can simply open a Terminal window, and type ssh UserID@electron.cs.uwindsor.ca at the command prompt to log into the server with ssh.
You can obtain a current copy of the Mozilla Firefox browser from http://www.mozilla.com/.
You can obtain a current copy of the Google Chrome browser from http://chrome.google.com/.
If you use MS-Windows, you can go to http://microsoft.com/ for the latest version of Internet Explorer - just go to the "Downloads" section.
Proper, working versions of Internet Explorer are not available for other systems without the use of a Virtual Machine with MS Windows installed on it, or some other windows emulation environment. For those who wish to attempt this, a good free virtual machine program is available at http://www.virtualbox.org/, however no support for this program will be provided for this class - it is recommended that you use the University of Windsor's Computer Center's computers to test your website using Internet Explorer if it is not already on your own system.
The most likely cause of this is something called "Smart Quotes", which were first introduced to word processors by Microsoft. They provide nice, fancy right and left facing double and single quotation marks, as well as some other fancy typographical characters for your word processor documents, to make them look nicer. Unfortunately, the way in which they were added does not properly conform to the ASCII character set, and thus breaks the validation of XHTML documents if they are present, and can even break your Javascript code and stylesheets. See the next item in this listing for how to deal with them.
The best, and easiest way of avoiding Smart-Quotes is to use an editor that does not create them in the first place. Two very good windows editors that can be used are Notepad++ and Crimson Editor, which can be found through the Links page of the course website. MS Notepad also works for this, and Wordpad can be used, provided that you go into the settings and turn off the use of smart-quotes, and remember to save your files as plain ASCII text. MS Word or OpenOffice Write can also be used, if you remember to go into the settings on your program and turn off the use of smart quotes there as well, and also save your file as ASCII TEXT, not HTML or any word processor format. (Doing this would allow you to make use of the spell-checking features in those word processing programs, but it is best to just type your content text in them and save as .txt, and then add your HTML tags with an editor such as Notepad++ or Crimson to avoid problems between the spellchecker and the HTML tags in your file.) People using Apple computers can open up a Terminal window, and use the nano text editor which is included with the OS X operating system, which functions exactly the same as the pico editor located on the class server.