The How/Why/Where of Lecture Notes

Why Are There Two Sets of Lecture Notes?

If you don't know what this question is asking, have a look at Prof. Rajeev's lecture notes page, and you'll see that all 26 lecture-notes files are listed on there twice.

Well, that's because they're slightly different. The first set are full-size, with large fonts and suitable for overhead transparencies, that sort of thing. They're mainly for viewing online, if you're using Netscape or IE with an Adobe Acrobat Reader plug-in so you can view PostScript(tm) files. Monitors have awful dpi (dots per inch), like between 72 and 110, so the files need to be bigger to really be readable.

However, don't try to print these files out at Taylor. They'll take forever to print, and the people there will get mad at you. That's because it's a lot of pages -- the first one alone (l1.ps) is fourteen pages, and if you were to print them all out it adds up to 288 pages (yes, I counted; I proofread them all). That's what the second set is for; I prepared those files shrunk by a factor of 2 in each direction, so that they take roughly one fourth the number of pages to print out (roughly, because each original file wasn't an integer multiple of 4 pages long). So, please print these out -- the whole semester only adds up to 80 pages using these files!

Also, don't forget, there is also a copy of the lecture notes (in an in-between size, with 2 pages per sheet of paper) on reserve in the POA library on the third floor of B&L.

Do I Need to Read the Lecture Notes?

Yes. (See Prof. Rajeev's course homepage and FAQ file, also.) The lectures are not redundant with the lecture notes -- he may not cover everything that's in there; so even going to the classes and reading the textbook doesn't mean you should ignore the lecture notes.

Do I Need to Go to Class if I Read the Lecture Notes?

Yes. Prof. Rajeev has much, much more to give you and try to help you learn than what is contained in the lecture notes (or the textbook). He's a very good teacher, but can only help you if you go to class. Enough said.

How do I Print Out the Lecture Notes?

The easiest way for me to explain how you do this is for you to use Lynx, a text-mode Web browser that you all have available to you on Uhura, to print the lecture notes out at Taylor Hall. Here goes:

1. Logging in to your Uhura account

I'll assume that you know how to do this... I'll only say here that if you're in B&L 304, at the "Local-X>" prompt (where X is a number), you need to type "telnet uhura.cc.rochester.edu" and hit Enter (i.e., you need to put in Uhura's complete address).

2. Using Lynx to get to the gopher server

You can run Lynx, once you're at your Uhura command prompt, by simply typing "lynx" and hitting Enter, or by entering "lynx URL", where URL is, well, a URL you want to start out looking at. For instance, to look at my home page, you would enter "lynx http://www.pas.rochester.edu/~mbanks/".

Now, to get to the lecture notes, you can either start from my home page and select the "Physics 121" link, which goes to my Physics 121 information page, and from there select the "lecture notes" link, or you can go from Prof. Rajeev's course homepage and follow links from there, or tell Lynx the address yourself by doing "lynx http://www.pas.rochester.edu/~rajeev/Lectures.html".

(Note: you can set bookmarks in Lynx as in other browsers, so to save time over the semester you could make a bookmark that points here. If you don't know how to do this, ask me.)

3. Choosing the lecture

This is simple, just cursor down to the second set of file links (see above for why), and select the desired one (by cursoring-right on it).

4. Printing the lecture

You should notice that when you hit cursor-right on the lecture-notes file, Lynx starts to download the file, then stops and prints at the bottom of the screen something like the following:

www/unknown      D)ownload, or C)ancel

This means that Lynx by itself doesn't know how to display PostScript(tm) files. Don't worry about it, just hit "d" and let it download.

Once it's finished downloading the file, a "Lynx Download Options" screen will appear, giving options of various things to do with the file. You can save it to disk on your account if you like, but unless you really want to use up lots of space on your Uhura account, don't bother. What you really want here is the last choice it should give you, something like "Double-sided output in Taylor Hall 30". (If there's no choice like this that appears, let me know immediately!) Select that choice (right-arrow key on it) and in a few minutes the lecture notes should be ready in Taylor.

5. Getting back out

To backtrack through documents you've seen in Lynx, use the left-arrow key.

However, if you're done with Lynx for now, just hit "Q" (yes, capital Q) to quit. (You can use a lowercase q, but then it'll prompt you about whether you really want to quit...)