Spring 2017/Environment setup
Contents
Using a virtual machine
Using GNU/Linux
Editing a wiki
Using IRC
Internet Relay Chat is decades-old technology that allows for convenient real-time online messaging for large groups of people, and also between individuals.
The official IRC channel for this class (and unofficial Swarthmore Computational Linguistics IRC channel) is #cl on sccs.swarthmore.edu, kindly hosted by SCCS.
Any arbitrary channel can be started by any user, though. The server must be accessed through the campus network or VPN.
There are good, Free IRC clients for nearly every operating system. The Linux installation in the virtual machine for class comes with HexChat, which is a good option for that environment.
We will be using IRC as a way to interact outside of the classroom, and sometimes in. It can be a good way to ask me for help or clarification on an assignment, in which case your classmates could benefit too. You can also use it to have general discussion among yourselves, or work remotely in groups.
There is an IRC channel for Apertium too. We will be using Apertium and related software throughout the course, so this can be a good place to ask for questions too.
Day 1 activity: log into the class channel from your virtual machine and greet everyone in the channel.
