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--- blog:spring2016:asutton5:journal [2016/03/13 23:48] – asutton5
+++ blog:spring2016:asutton5:journal [2016/05/03 03:50] (current) – asutton5
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 ======UNIX/Linux Fundamentals Journal======
-March 9th, 2016
+====May 2nd, 2016====
-===============
+This week has been extremely blazé just reading through the EoCE and researching thing I will need to know to complete it. I really wish I didn't get so uptight about responsibilities and grades. The last few weeks of any semester are enough to drive me right to the edge of sanity. This semester, in particular, however is turning out to be acceptionally so. This class has been, by far, the most educational class I have ever taken. The other class I am taking at the moment is a lot more confusing to me and although I am learning some things about software development and system analysis that I didn't realize before, but it is definitely not my cup of tea so to speak.
+I think the best thing I am taking away from this semester is a clearer picture of the educational path I want to peruse beyond my associates degree and some fields I absolutely do not want to peruse. I love trying to figure things out.  This is probably why I love math and computer "hacking" so much.
+I just have to learn how to relax. And I really need to learn how to manage my time and loan out projects better. Two more weeks and then I can breath again for a while. :/
+====April 25th, 2016====
+This week has been pretty uneventful. I am spending as much time as possible going through a video playlist on youtube to really gain a deeper understanding of scripting in Unix. It is enlightening and extremely helpful. One thing I learned, which I started to grasp last week but didn’t fully understand, was the importance of starting batch files with a version of unix being used to write the script. I found it especially interesting in relation to writing CGI for web pages, which I’m sure has nothing to do with the fact that I am a web design major.
+I have also been reviewing the information in the EoCE to get a good feel for the wholes that are in what I have learned to this point. I also plan to go back and review all of the labs we have done thus far. Hopefully this upcoming week will be filled with clarifications and a more comfortable feel for what I have gained from this course.
+====April 18th, 2016====
+I have a ADD. I was diagnosed years ago. This week, I have learned two things about this aspect of my life. Although I have a very hard time focusing, or at least staying focused, when it comes to computers, I am hyper focused. I have easily spent more than 20 hours this week on this project. I also have a tendency to get so focused on shoving a square peg through a round hole that I don't take the time to really evaluate the situation. One of the mistakes I made that took an exceptionally long time was a syntactical error that would have been sooner discovered by really concentrating on the structure of the command rather than seeking out alternative commands that would accomplish the same thing.
+This has made me think a lot about how I can start organizing my time better. What can I do to plan out projects in a way that will help me to NOT get so hyper focused on one task that I lose literally hours of time going down random rabbit holes. I have tried this, maybe frivolously, in the past, to no avail. Guess it is time to find a system that will work for me.
+====April 11, 2016====
+This has been another thought provoking week. I can’t learn enough fast enough. I am continuing to work on the udr2 lab as I fumble through the syntax of Unix scripting. Although I have taken a C++ class before, trying to alter the code from last weeks’ lab proved more difficult that I had originally thought it would be. Slow but sure getting there.
+The lab for this week, upr0, looked like it was going to be a piece of cake. I had this one. The read, write, and execute settings for user group and everyone else is something I remember well from my admin days of old. However, the joke was on me. The Set UID, Set GID and Sticky Bit settings were completely new and foreign to me. The first time I looked at it, I thought I had it. But I was seeing a correlation between the first character in the permissions set and these new gems that wasn’t there. I really like the way the lab was formulated though, because by the time I finished the last set, I really felt confident that I knew how to read the permissions accurately. The only problem that still remains is that I have no idea what these special settings are used for or what purpose they serve. More research for a less busy time in the future.
+====April 4, 2016=====
+Information Overload‼ Ok. Not really. But every week I feel closer and closer to connecting a LOT of dots. And every week, I gain a deeper and deeper understanding of the functionality of the computer machinery. The whole mentally exhausting process it like having a name on the tip of your tongue and no matter how hard you try, never being able to quite remember it. I feel like I am getting closer and closer to a “core” understanding (pardon the pun), but every time I turn a corning, there is another stretch of path and another corner.
+For every answer I find, I think of two more questions. If files can be broken down ultimately into binary and “decoded” how can encryption and data security ever truly be trusted? How can there ever be an encryption process that cannot be cracked.
+The process of programming ultimately takes human readable code and breaks it down into machine language that “explains” to the computer what it is supposed to do. I have always perceived that binary is used with machines to represent a series of switches that are either on, or off. I guess I still see It this way, but my propensity toward thinking so far down the rabbit whole seeking the origin of it all makes me wonder. If the zeros and ones are on/off switches, who came up with thee system that says a certain combination of 8 “switches” is the representation of an actual alpha “a”. The plot continues to thicken and the next corner can never get here fast enough.
+====March 28, 2016====
+At the beginning of this semester, I wasn't having too much trouble with these journal entries. As they began to get longer and longer in requirements, I though "I am never going to be able to come up with that many words." This on top of the stress I was feeling from the course content in addition to being a full-time employee and a full-time mom and wife caused me to just give up doing it a couple weeks ago to just typing as much as I could muster which fell disappointingly short of the mark last week.
+However, I have a new found energy. This course is far more beneficial any class I have t ever taken. It really makes me stop and think. I can't google every solution and I really need to focus on documentation.
+This week's lab has been exceptionally challenging, and exceptionally education. I have learned things about partition tables and hex tables than I never knew before. For instance, who in tarnation came up with the bright idea to number bytes in a CHS table from zero to seven as opposed to from one to eight, and to call it a CHS value, but order it Header-Cylinder-Sector. Shouldn’t it be an HCS value?? As if this stuff isn’t confusing enough.
+I already had a good grasp on the concept of binary and how it translates to decimal, but I now have a much better understanding of how it relates to actual data. This is cool!
+Again, I spent a lot of time "not finding" the information I wanted in the manuals and the lab itself because of my lack of focus on detail. I tried to use the wrong resources in the wrong places and went down a lot of rabbit trails. The overlay had me particularly stumped as I kept searching the documentation for that specific term instead of focusing on what that term actually means.
+I find myself wasting hours before asking questions, not because I am adamant on finding the solution or worried that I will ask a stupid question (I always tell my students that the only dumb question is the one that you don't ask). Its because I get so hyper-focused on the task at hand that I lose track of time. I guess I will have to start using a timer and see if that helps.
+As a side note to the project, I also found the ability to just copy a file from the partition to a subdirectory in the Unix environment a bit surreal. I copied one of the images (rikerleg.jpg) from the partition into the working Unix directory I was in. Because of the way I think about the barrier between DOS and Unix, It was kind of like pulling a cartoon character out of a television set and having it function in the real world. Weird, I know. This admission alone is enough to dispel the notion that my wasted time is because of a fear of looking "silly".
+Thinking about the bit by bit process of copying, however, this makes more sense. The file, when it was being copied, was not compressed. So if it is being copied bit by bit, transferring it from the partition to the Unix environment, and the ultimately emailing it to myself to be able to view the picture makes more sense.
+Another question milling around in my mind, possibly thrown off by prior DOS knowledge is this:
+DOS uses a FAT (file allocation table). My understanding is that the FAT is an index that organizes the different locations of the file pieces (they are not contiguous) of each file. Does Unix not work this way, and if not, how does it deal with storage space in relationship to deleting and creating new files?
+The more I learn, the more questions I have. =O
+====March 21, 2016====
+The last two weeks have been extremely stressful. However, I have also learned a lot. I not only learned a lot about Unix but I learned even more about my idiosyncrasies. Some good. Some bad.
+For example, my procrastination issues have NOT improved as I once thought they had. I always have a tendency to think I have more time left to do things than I actually have. This causes me to do other things that suddenly shoot up my priority list because I still have “two days” left to work on the current project.
+While finishing up the udr0 project, which seemed to take for ever and ever, I ran up against several stumbling blocks. Most of which were my own inability to focus. I will get in the middle of a step and then forget where I was going with it and what I have already done.
+When I first started udr0, I felt like I was NEVER going to be able to get a grasp on it. I also got really frustrated and caught up on the image manipulating portion of this project. The rle looked to me to be more of a file format than a compressed file.
+====March 9, 2016====
 I am falling deeper into the pit of lost. I can’t figure out how to get the config files to work in Unix. I have hit one brick wall after another. Everything I have found has lead me to believe that the .profile and some others belong in the home directory in order to be effective. However making changes to these file doesn’t seem to affect my environment. I have skimmed through the sample files and read through the “live” versions of some of them and don’t seem to be making any headway. I may not get credit for them, but I will continue to try to figure it out and get them in as soon as I can. My home internet went down this weekend and I feel like I am drowning in a sea of over-commitment that is overtaking my life as a whole. One thing I am learning from this class is that I am not half as organized as I thought I was.
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 I find some of the documentation in the manuals or in the config files themselves is above my head. In other words, maybe I am so used to DOSees that Unixees is Chinese to me. Oh well. The more time I spend with it the more “fluent” I guess I will become. I even went so far as to download Cygwin to my pc this week in hopes of spending a little more time with Unix playing around and getting to know it better. Like learning to create and manage user accounts. I must have know how to do this once upon a time but I don’t remember any of it.
-February 29, 2016
+====February 29, 2016====
-=================
 Every week the labs for this class get harder and harder. This week I didn’t feel like I could even complete the task, and I didn’t. I turned in a project that was half finished. Getting the feel for using the Vi and Vim editors is turning out to be such a challenge. I have definitely been spoiled with this WYSIWIG era we seem to be delving deeper and deeper into. As I write this entry for March 2nd, it is actually March 8th. I didn’t realize until well after the assignment was due that I hadn’t completed, or even started or thought about for that matter, my journal entry. I got so wrapped up in the project and over shot the mark.

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