Today we talked about the different variable data types and related them to “buckets” of varying sizes, which helped to make sense of things as well as shined some perspective on how to make proper use of memory management in the C programming language. Bad programming is something seen more often than realized, but it's good to see how we can possess “good programming” skills.

The only really big difference to C compared to Java that I have seen so far is the use of pointers. We haven't gone into huge detail with them yet, but they definitely look interesting. Another thing we saw that was slightly different than Java was the void data type, which is in java, but as pointed out, C allows us to manipulate raw memory with it somehow, so that will be interesting to look into in the coming days.

I haven't had much practice with Linux or Unix. And while I have had some, it will be interesting/challenging getting used to C as well as another operating system entirely. Exciting for sure.

We've been going over some useful commands / tricks for the Unix operating system. We learned how to assign variables and use those variables in practical scenarios, such as with the full quotes (''), half quotes (““), and back quotes (``). We've also been going over how to puff-puff-pass some output to another program using the pipe (|) command. We've also been exploring the permissions of files using ls -l and the chmod command to change those permissions. I've also completed the first puzzle box project for the class, which was fairly easy. The main concept was that each file was renamed to have a different “extension” as to make it not easy to know that some files were tar archives, for example. The commands used were tar -xvf <file> to extract the hidden tar archive, uudecode <file> to decode a uuencodeed file, and again uudecode to decode the BASE64 encoded file.

This is significant because we're just learning the basics of this operating system in some fun puzzle kind of ways. We're learning the significance of many of these commands as well as how we can manipulate the output and input for these commands.

Everything seems to be pretty simple so far.