vi. Unix exam

helloworld

So last week, I took the unix midterm. All in all, it was very straight forward and similar to the practice exam. I did have a major problem though. I was stuck on Part 4 Question 2 for a very long time. The beginning of the question (“Using the file `files/testdata` as input, “) definitely threw me off. After spending a lot of time on the problem, I realized I should move on with the exam since I still had a huge portion left with a lot of wasted time. I now regret not skipping the question entirely since I could have spent more time on other problems!

Unfortunately, I took the exam early in the morning so I was not aware that the problem was written wrong until we received an e-mail later in the day. In the end, I left that problem blank since I had no idea how to implement the question as it was written. Hopefully this will be taken into consideration when the exam is graded for all of the students that took it early.

Midterm Complications

After completing the practice midterm exam, I felt pretty confident going into the actual exam. The questions on the exam were pretty straight forward and somewhat challenging. However, one of the scripts that was supposed to record entries in the terminal did not work. I decided I was wasting too much time messing around with it and decided to leave it as is. Also, one of the questions asks you to correct some mistakes in a program. There was no description of what the program was supposed to do and took extra time to determine if the program was functioning correctly or just functioning. Overall, the exam ended up frustrating me and taking much longer than it should have.

Midterm Week Updtes

We finally had our first midterm for ECE 2524. Before the day of the exam, I went over the lecture notes and sample exercises for the exam. I felt pretty confident, but the exam did not end up what I was expecting. Downloading the file, working on the file i.e. solving all the questions, and uploading the file back up on scholar took too long. In addition, the instructions/questions or the guidelines for the exam were so long that it took about 20-25 minutes to read and comprehend the questions. I did not think that the exam was tough, but the time spent on others things did not allow me to work on the actual test. As a result, I had to rush through the exam and make guesses through out the exam. There was also a part where the function to record script wasn’t right. It took me three tries to figure out that the syntax was wrong, so I was not able to show my work for question 4. Since this class is a point based system, I believe that I could still get a decent grade if possible an A, if I do well on the other projects.

As far as ECE 3574, we got our first GUI assignment. The project doesn’t seem that difficult, if we use the QT creator, but the instructions specify us not to use it. In addition, we have to use signal and slots to map the corresponds parent elements of the Qwidget to its child elements. I think this might be tricky. Well, these are my updates for this week. Please check back next week for more updates.

Intro to Unix ECE 2524 Entry #6

Had our midterm exam this past Wednesday which went alright.  Just barely got it submitted within the time limit wish I had had another half hour just to work on it without a late penalty.  I think I spent too much time in the beginning trying to get the commands to return what I wanted that I didn’t have enough time for writing/fixing the scripts in one section.  I attempted all 3 of the questions in that section even though we were only required to do 2/3, but after trying question 1, I was pretty sure I did it incorrectly and moved on to questions 2 and 3.  I tried to fix the code on 2, but I didn’t know what the program was supposed to do, and I didn’t have time to look through the code to find out.  I fixed the syntactical errors and hoped that was good enough then moved on to number 3.  I had maybe 10 minutes left to write this script, and I think I got the bulk of it correct, but there were still some errors when I submitted it just because I didn’t have time to debug it. Hopefully it turns out better than I felt after submitting it.

In ECE 3574, we got our first GUI assignment which was kind of cool.  It was rather basic, just setting of some buttons to do some things and display some dialog boxes.  After getting the signal mapper to work properly, it wasn’t too difficult to write the code for each button. I did have one issue with getting the checkbox in the qerrormessage which controls whether to display the message again to work correctly.  From reading through the documentation it seemed that the checkbox should have all the functionality already implemented, but this was not the case for my code.  Whether the box was checked or not, the message was always displayed. Even after working with the TA we couldn’t figure out what was wrong with it.  I ultimately just had to add my own qcheckbox widget to a qmessagebox and writing the functionality of it myself.  Besides that one issue, the rest of the code only took maybe 3 or 4 hours to write everything, so not too bad.