Lab46 Wiki

Today I played around with changing back and forth into directories and I believe I've gotten a pretty good grip on them. I also used the “ls” command on a lot of the directories to see the files inside. This was significant because it gets me familiar with commands and routes. Also, it allows me to just kind of “play” with the different directories and see what's in them, look at the files I find, etc. I'm not keen on the idea of arguments in commands yet, that's still a little confusing to me. I'm just going to have to look into that a little deeper. As far as the course goes, it's not super challenging as of yet and I'm not experiencing any major problems, which is nice. I'm looking forward to the future of this course!

The move, copy, and list commands are extremely useful tools, I have come to realize. These commands are essential for basic functions with the computer. And, in all honesty, the commands used in this way (where mv can change the names of files, etc.) are better, in my opinion, than on Windows where everything is a GUI. I feel as if doing these functions through commands gives it more of a purpose, if that makes sense. I'm not an expert with the commands by any means, but I really enjoy using them. The concepts of arguments are still a little confusing to me–not because I don't understand them anymore, but because there are so many of them for all the different commands that it makes it hard to keep track of what does what. The move command actually interests me quite a bit in that it also acts as a rename command. I never thought of renaming a file as actually moving it, but that definitely makes sense now seeing as how it's basically a new file after it is renamed. I need a little more practice with the copy command, not because its a hard command to use, but simply because I haven't really played with that one too much. I'm excited to learn about more in-depth commands that do large processes within unix. I've always been really interested in the command line, but I've never really delved into it until Corning, and I'm not disappointed with becoming familiar with it. As far as the course goes, I'm still not having too many issues doing things other than memorization. But I suppose that will come with practice.

Archiving and compressing files is much different on a command line interface than it is using a GUI. I mean, with a GUI, it's literally just point-and-click; but where's the fun in that? I think I may have said this in one of my other posts, but it feels so much more rewarding using a command line interface to accomplish otherwise simple tasks. It actually takes effort to accomplish tasks and makes it feel like you're actually doing something. GUI's get extremely boring now that I've played around with command line, to say the least. One thing that bothered me, especially in this lab, was the fact that in order to move files in and out of the same folders, I had to type out the long command every time. But now that I know about aliases, I can really see me taking advantage of those while working. They kind of remind me of macros in a way, in that you can just set whatever you like to run whatever command and argument. I feel like those will make things much smoother while working. Also, I really enjoy how customizable things are are around the operating system. I never realized that, just through commands, you can customize promts and colors and backgrounds and everything. It's actually really neat. And I can't forget about the Asciiart. I've always heard of asciiart but I never really put in the time to google it or find out what it really was. In some cases, I suppose that wasn't necessarily a bad thing because some weird stuff is out there in asciiart… But in other cases, people make really cool stuff that, I would consider, actual art. It's really neat what people can create just using ascii characters. Like the Star Wars movie in asciiart for example: A.) Someone has to have an insane amount of patience to work on something like that and B.) That person is also insanely talented to be able to re-create a movie only using basic computer characters. As each week passes in this class, I get more and more fascinated with the command line environment. I always considered myself a hardware kind of guy when it comes to computers because I always thought software environments were too confusing. But now that I've had time to play around with it, learning new things about software and the command line is just as fun as learning new things about computer hardware to me, and that's exciting.

The puzzlebox. So far, I haven't progressed extremely far in it, but I'm doing the practice steps quite a bit. First thing I did after copying the file.txt into my home directory was cat(1) it. All it states is “This is a simple text file. It contains ASCII text.” which is a good thing I suppose since when you file(1) it, it tells you its just ASCII text. Everything checks out that far, and no major confusion yet (which, I mean, there really shouldn't be any confusion in those findings). Next was compressing the file with gzip. This yielded little surprise also when it stated “gzip compressed data, was 'file.txt',” which, again, makes sense. After recompressing the file using the fastest compression argument, the output read the same as the first time I compressed the file, except this time it also reads “max speed” near the end of the line. So, as far as the practice segment goes, that was easily do-able. However, a practice is a practice for a reason; it's meant to be easy. I'm safely assuming the puzzlebox will be much more in-depth than the practice commands were. Another thing I noticed while playing around with these commands is that when I compressed the file the first time and then uncompressed it, I did a file(1) on it and it didn't say what it had originally been. For example, when I compressed the file the first time it stated it had originally been “file.txt”. So when I did a file(1) on the uncompressed file.txt, it just said the original output line again, which I thought was strange. I expected it to say it had been “file.txt.gz” before or something, just stating that it had been changed. With all that said, I'm pretty excited to really dig into the idea of debugging. I feel as if this is a pretty important skill to have when working with computers, and I'm excited to be able to practice it.

During this week, we were working on the puzzlebox next. This project was actually much more fun than the original puzzlebox. I feel as if this project allowed for more experimentation with commands and what not, which is always cool. I really enjoy learning about new commands and what their capabilities are. For example, when learning to convert hexadecimal to octal, that was frustrating at first but it was really cool and kind of rewarding after I had finally done it. I personally think that the puzzlebox projects are my favorite projects because they really make you think outside of the box, ironically. It's really just playing around with stuff until it works, which is great when it finally does.

This past week was break, so nothing super new occurred. I played around with scripting a little bit during the break. I attempted to make a script that would take me straight to my projects sub folder in my src directory. I couldn't get it to work unfortunately, and had to make a permanent alias instead, which ended up working pretty well. I'd still like to figure out a way to do it through scripting instead of using an alias, but I suppose I'll have to play around with it a little more.

This week we've been working on the web page adventure. I did not expect this project to be nearly as tedious as it has been. I feel that this is mainly due to having to learn basic html on top of actually doing the project. While tedious, however, it has been quite fun. I'm enjoying having to create my own story. Also, I really enjoy when the things I plan to work, work. That's probably the most exciting thing of all, because many instances have occurred where I attempt to do things and it just fails all together. Luckily, I'm finally getting a hand on the basic coding of html that most things have stopped failing for me.

This week we are working on udr0, or Unix data recovery. I have not advanced insanely far on this project yet, mainly due to other factors like work and essays and what not that have been interrupting my time. I have, however, looked through the memdump file, and was a little thrown back by it. Man, is there a lot of information there. I'm excited to really delve into this project, though, because I enjoy the projects that work like puzzles (like the puzzleboxes, for example). I have looked at the dectohex program also, and don't really know what's going on there, mainly because c is not a programming language I have worked with.

This week I've been been working on sfp0. This has been difficult, to say the least. I was working on this most of the night last night, and I've had to write things down manually, write and erase multiple forms of scripts, and so on. As of now, I have the script reading the current day, and the semester in which the current day is in (sort of. I just have to copy and paste the same lines to work with other config files, so that's a WIP). I'm currently trying to get the whole “week” thing working, which has been the hardest part so far. But, like other projects, I find this one pretty fun because it's kind of like a puzzle. Everything has to flow together in order to work, and I have to try and figure it out. It's pretty entertaining.

Still working on sfp0 and maaaaaaan is this project something else. I've run into so many errors along the way (which is mainly my fault because of my lack of patience), but I have also solved so many of my issues I had in the beginning, which is a good feeling. As of now, I have a functioning week-displaying-system, but I'm not entirely sure if it's accurate. I still have some testing to do. Also, I have not implemented break weeks into the weeks yet, so its just counting everything, which is another issue. Slowly but surely, this project is coming along.

FINALLY I finished sfp0. The hardest part about about this entire project for me was figuring out how to tell the script to skip breaks. I figured that this would be one of the easier things to do in the script since the breaks were given in the config files, but I was really wrong. Like, realllllyy wrong. But man, it feels good to finally be done with that project. As much as it was a pain to do though, I learned a lot of useful things about scripts and vi and other things, so all in all, great experience.