Category Archives: Homework

Text Editors?

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Hello everybody!

I wanted to make sure that at least one of my blog posts focuses on the ongoing discussion in the UNIX/LINUX world about the best text editor. Given the popularity of third-part editors, some of the prominent text editors in my opinion are VIM, EMACS and GEDIT. Personally, I’ve only worked with VIM and GEDIT and I’ve really enjoyed VIM.

In all honestly, I don’t know how much difference using one text editor over another has made since all of them primarily do the same thing and provide the same feature but some have a much easier and user-friendly UI than others. During my internship at Qualcomm, I primarily worked with VIM and it was a good experience – VIM primarily allows every action to be completed through keyboard shortcuts, rendering the mouse basically useless. While this may be frustrating at first, it definitely becomes second nature after a couple of weeks of thorough usage and editing actually takes place a lot faster as compared to constantly switching between keyboard shortcuts and mouse clicks. It also has multiple modes such as edit mode and insert mode which allows for a greater level of flexibilty.

The other text editor I’ve had some experience with is GEDIT which I used for this course over the semester. GEDIT has a very simple user interface which makes it a good text editor for beginners but does not seem to have some of the more advanced features that other text editors may provide. I used GEDIT for the entirety of the semester because I didn’t need to make any special modifications to text and GEDIT seemed like the simple and convenient choice. I’ve personally never had any experience with EMACS.

Until next time!

Creating An Assignment

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Hello everybody!

We had our final homework assignment due today which was probably the most fun and involved assignment we had so far. I really enjoyed some of the technical homework assignments we’ve had this semester, especially the ones that involved Python scripting but the open to interpretation nature of this particular assignment made it challenging and fun at the same time. We were asked to design any sort of assignment that may be used for the class next semester. I decided to create an assignment that would give the user a good understanding of pipes and filters which forms the basis of more complex scripting skills.

One of the best aspects of this assignment was the level of freedom we had to implement the assignment. We could make the assignment as complex or simple as we liked, as technically challenging as we liked and providing the solution was optional. While my assignment is posted to GitHub, the essence was familiarizing the user with reading in lines of data, manipulating it in a certain way and then outputting the lines of data to the standard display after modification. In doing these manipulations and modifications, the user was in fact creating somewhat of a mini-language that could be used to write a short action file.

I really enjoyed doing this assignment and I would encourage the classes that follow to have a few more homework assignments that allow for this sort of freedom, especially since I believe students work hardest when they have the freedom to choose what they want to work on.  Overall, a great assignment and I would recommend putting in a couple of more similar assignments in the curriculum of the semesters to follow.

Until next time!