This is the end of the third week of Unix fundamentals, and things are starting to finally sink in. Concepts, commands, and other ideas relating to our work in class are beginning to become memorized. However, there is still a lot to be learned and many things that must be committed to memory. I've found that I'm going to need to devote much more time outside of class to practicing skills than I have been already.

We covered most everything that we needed to know in class about the directories that are located within Lab46 that would be useful to us. We learned about the var, usr, bin, sbin, etc, and more. It's important to know where something is before you can use it. We also learned about the cal, pom and man commands. These are very useful, while pom is simply cool. Unix is an amazing system. We also learned about the status command to see our status in the class. ie grades. The paths around unix are beginning to become a bit more worn. I don't quite know why I like to speak in metaphors…

Things move much faster in this class than I ever thought that they would, and sometimes its hard to keep up while taking notes at the same time. I have to determine what is important and what is simply auxiliary knowledge, and this can be difficult, especially when I may have to use my notes to contribute to the group's note page.

I have also learned that there is a big difference between being able to type something into the CLI and understanding what you're typing in. Remembering that CLI is simply a bare bones version of say, windows explorer, makes things a bit easier. I'm simply translating a double-click into a typed command. Kind of like learning a language in a new dialect.

Just finished the Archive Handling project yesterday, and even though things took a bit of working around, everything went relatively smoothly. I'm really starting to get a grasp on all of this unix stuff. wish I had been enlightened on this wonderful system earlier on.

Got through the practice just fine, and everything was pretty straight forward. Upon working with the puzzle.txt file, I used some of the same commands, and was able to see that the file was actually a compressed .tar file. However, when I attempted to decompress it, the file decompressed alright, but all I received was a bunch of ASCII characters, and the text, “Leaf on the wind.wav”. I was compelled to do a google search, and I found a ridiculously addictive game. Needless to say I was side-tracked for a while.

Started the second puzzlebox project (puzzlebox2) today, and needless to say is is much more of a challenge than the previous one was. I managed to get about half of the way through it, before hitting a wall with the stage2 file command. It seems that something is either wrong with the command, the file, or the file contents. I continuously get the response “ambiguous redirect”. Hmm…

The wonders never end in Unix, with new things being learned every day. It turns out that my life is a lie, since as of this week, zombies actually do exist. On top of that, I learned a bunch of new commands of course, and also learned how to kill things. There are 64 different unique ways to kill something in Unix. Who'd have thought. You can also kill a batch session remotely too, which could come in handy when you forget to log off somewhere.

In the project realm, Dataproc is a bit tougher than expected. Its a bit more formal than the puzzleboxes, yet is still engaging and interesting just the same. The time extension was a huge relief as well. There will be quite a feeling of accomplishment when this project is complete.

The dataproc project was completed earlier this week, and proved to be one of the more challenging projects that we've had thus far. It wasn't nearly as tricky as the puzzleboxes, but it involved a lot more thinking and research. I now have a pretty good idea regarding data manipulation. the tools such as uniq, cut, sort and many more are becoming commonplace. Now we have to build upon that in our latest project: writing a script to compile data. specifically speaking, grades. It seems rather tough, but by no means impossible. I'm already about a 1/4 of the way done. We'll see by Tuesday how challenging this really is.

Today has been full of misinterpreted times, seeing as it is the end of daylight savings time. Anyways, this week has been a very busy one in the unix world. We are working on our grade calculator scripting project and using the skills we have learned thus far to manipulate and display specific data. It's amazing what we are now capable of in regards to computers compared to the start of the semester. When Matt says that we have all the necessary tools to carry out a task, he is most definitely right. The key however is being able to remember everything and apply it in the most efficient manner. With that said, I have surprised myself with what I have been able to create on my own without any extra outside influence.

We also had our first knowledge assessment this past Thursday. The KA, however not extremely difficult, became much harder to tackle when I had trouble recollecting the simplest of the tasks that we had learned. The more complex things made complete sense to me, but I could not begin to work on that without remembering the key basics. I will have to study up a bit more to make sure I am truly proficient.

This week we continued to work on scripts and expanded our knowledge on how to make things continually easier when working in UNIX. Looking back towards the very beginning of the year, (and in reality it wasn't that long ago) a lot of us were rather novice and didn't know the first thing about using the command line. It's impressive how far we've come. If this much is achievable in such little time, I can only imagine where we'll be in 2 years.

Anyways, we also covered how to automate things further, with commands such as at and cron. These are extremely useful in automating tasks that we would otherwise have to run manually every time when you wanted specific information. Sed also is rather mind-blowing as well. Who knew you could do so much in one line incantation?

November is ending, and there are only two more weeks left in the semester. Time flies like crazy, and even in such a seemingly short time, we've learned so much. On top of that, the more amazing fact is that we have just scratched the surface of Unix. If we can do this much with so little, who knows the skills we will understand in another year.

We are currently working on our third scripting project, calculating the amount of time each user of Lab46 has been online. This script is a bit harder than the others, but is still accomplishable. We now have to use the skills in different ways than we are used to in order to get around the obstacles presented.

Last week of actual classes are over, and finals are on the way. The last thing that we are to do in the best class ever is the famous end of class experience. It is the most involved of all our projects, but for good reason. We are putting everything we have learned into one experience. Bring it on.