Open Educational Resources (OER) for Distributed Systems

This page collects OER presentations (slides with embedded audio, available under Section 3, preceded by usage hints in Section 2) for selected lectures on Distributed Systems at the University of Münster, Germany.

Warning: Presentations here were used in summer term 2018 and winter term 2018/2019 but are not maintained any longer. They contain course-specific information, making adoption elsewhere harder than it should be. For summer term 2019 and beyond, I’m separating slides that focus on specific topics, maintained in a group for OER on computer science, from course-specific additions, maintained in a group for OER courses. E.g., those presentations supersede the presentations here (source material).

If you are teaching or learning Distributed Systems, feel free to use, share, and adapt my presentations. As usual for projects on GitLab, you can open issues to report bugs or suggest improvements, ideally with merge requests.

Presentations make use of the HTML presentation framework reveal.js.

Presentations make use of the HTML presentation framework reveal.js.

• Key bindings and navigation
  • Press “?” to see key bindings of reveal.js
  • In general, “n” and “p” move to next and previous slide; mouse wheel works as well
  • Up/down (swiping, arrows) move within sections, left/right jump between sections (type “o” to see what is where)
  • Type slide’s number followed by Enter to jump to that slide
  • Browser history (buttons, Alt-CursorLeft, Alt-CursorRight)
  • Zoom with Ctrl-Mouse or Alt-Mouse
  • Search with Ctrl-Shift-F
• PDF export
  • Why do you want to do this?
    • You may want to download and annotate/enrich source files instead
      • Org mode, which is plain text
  • Change the URL by adding ?print-pdf after .html, then print to PDF file (usually, Ctrl-p)
  • Alternatively, depending on the specific project, PDFs might also have been generated via LaTeX from org source files. If available, those PDF versions are accessible by replacing .html in a presentation’s URL with .pdf
• Audio
  • If audio is embedded, the free Ogg format is used
    • Playback should start automatically
      • See compatibility and known issues of the underlying audio plugin
      • Firefox, seems to work everywhere
    • Audio controls are shown at bottom left
• Notes
  • Slides contain additional notes as plain text if you see the folder icon
    • Click on that icon or press “s” to see the “speaker notes view”
    • You need to allow pop-ups
      • If the pop-up window does not work, you may need to press “s” twice or close the pop-up window once
  • If the slide contains audio, the notes are a transcript of the audio’s text
• Links
  • In presentations, internal and external links (the former are also called relative, while the latter embed a domain in the URL) are styled differently
    • Different colors for internal (blue) and external (green) links
    • Special link icon for “non-local” links
      • E.g., in this external link to a page explaining external links, which are typically served by independent organizations with their own agendas, with or without their own privacy policies
      • But also for links between different presentations (in particular, this allows to recognize forward references, which may be safely ignored upon first contact)
    • In summary, presentations (not this page) use three link styles:
      • External (green with icon)
      • Relative into different presentation (blue with icon)
      • Relative within presentation (blue without icon)

Note: Presentations linked here are generated automatically from their source files. They are updated throughout the term (and thereafter). The PDF versions provided below are generated via LaTeX from org source files.

• Git Introduction (PDF)
• Distributed Systems (PDF)
• Internet (PDF)
• Web and E-Mail (PDF)
• Domain Name System (DNS) (not part of CACS 2018) (PDF)

For offline work (also on mobile devices), you can download the results of the latest pipeline execution on GitLab or clone the source repository and generate presentations yourself.

In the spirit of Open Educational Resources (OER), source files, necessary software, and presentations are published in this GitLab repository under free licenses. All OER presentations are created from plain text files in a simple text format called Org Mode (a lightweight markup language), focusing on content, while layout is defined separately. Importantly, the separation of content and layout simplifies collaboration across organizational boundaries, and the use of a simple text format enables comparisons of adapted or enhanced versions (with diff-like functionality).

Using the free software emacs-reveal these text files are translated into reveal.js HTML presentations, which can be viewed on (almost) any device with a Web browser. In times of dragnet surveillance and surreptitious as well as blatant data brokerage I recommend the Firefox variant Tor Browser as tool for digital self-defense (here in English and here in German); presentations work for me under the higher-than-default “Safer” security settings in Tor Browser.