I have been in angst toward using anything other than lab46 for writing and compiling any of my C++ programs. I had mentioned this to Joe in class yesterday and got no response. I had told him that the Mingw did not recognize the “gcc” command, his response was that it was a pathing issue and walked away. He helped me with the pathing the day earlier. So now I have decided that all programs wrote in his class and this class, I will write in lab46.

I am not accustom to writing journals. I am sort of trending water right now. I do not have prior knowledge of the Linux system so this will be interesting. I have however been in Joe Oppenhiem's course, so I so know what is expected of me. I hope to keep ahead of the course assignments and thus keep myself from drowning. I am fearful that I will lapse in my entries and post though. I will try to be vigil and keep up with it. I am having trouble though trying to figure out all that I have to do for this week. I will be down at the Business Office early tomorrow to ask about what I might have missed.

This is the first time in a week and a half that I am able to look at a screen and not throw up. I found that this archive project took so much time. But because Chris R. and myself teamed up on it we were able to figure out what one could not. The task was a lot more daunting than expected. The sheer joy felt when the task was finished was indescribable. I am so happy to have someone help me through this because if I did not I would have gotten a big fat Zero!!!! I find that for the most part everything that was required of us was in the assignment itself. There were so many helpful hints and links in the assignment page. I hope that this pattern will continue for the rest of the semester!

This week we looked at the puzzlebox. I learned that even though a file says it is a certain file that might be what it is. Using the file command can help to decipher the actual file origins and allow you to view it. I suffered through about three hours of torture the first night and got nowhere! I figured it was just something that I just wasn't seeing. So I turned in for the night.

I got up this morning thinking that I was not going to get a grade on this project. I went to class determined to get together with the guys from my class to try to figure this out. During the time waiting for class to start I thought I would give it one more try. I solved the puzzle within the hour! It must have been that I just needed time for the information to sink in.

It has been a while since I have wrote in the opus. I spent my week off busy as all hell. I did not spend one day on the puzzlebox next homework. I thought that once I got home that I would sit down and get busy on it and try to do it on my own. I spent six hours on it and got nowhere. I was able to get to stage two and that was it. I just could not get the password correct. I took a break and played some COD and hoped back on the homework. Got nowhere again! frustrated I went to bed and got some sleep to able to drive my wife to her outpatient operation.

Hoped back on today after returning from hospital and retried puzzlebox next. Didn't get any further than yesterday. Called Cole Brown to get some help. Found out they were able to do it in class today. He said that he can help me after class tomorrow. I thought ok and went on to other homework.

Thought I would try again after homework was done. Remembered Cole saying that the password had to be enter exactly. So I re-converted the hex to octal and then the octal to ascii. I made sure I wrote everything down and made sure I recorded every punctuation and spaces. When I entered the password I was able to made to the next stage. Once there I was able to see that I had to tac rev or cat the oarts again before I could submit! I'm not very good at this! I was able to get the picture correct after another two hours. Now it is about 3:45 am and I'm so happy I got it done. But I'm probably going to be very tired for Joe's class in 6 hours. Oh well, at least I got this one out of the way! Good night.

problem with opus when accessing at home:

SSH -g -L 8080:www:80

8080 is local port www is destination 80 is destination port

http://localhost:8080/opus/spring2015/user/start