Well the semester is coming to a close and our Unix class is about to end. So that leaves me with the question, how much am I going to be using Unix now? I’m so familiar with windows I can’t imagine myself switching over. I have my hard drive partitioned so I don’t plan on removing it, but I do wonder if I will use it much now. I was also using Unix in ECE 3574 when we were developing with Qt. Maybe I’ll use it in future classes? I’m sure it’ll come up somewhere.

Anyways I really enjoyed this class and I can definitely see the benefits of using and being familiar with Unix. Hopefully I will continue to use it and stay familiar with it even if it’s not a necessity. Well this is blog post number ten so goodbye everybody!

-K.I.S.S.

After thinking about this for a while, I wanted to come up with an assignment that is similar to the midterm we took in this class. Like the student could download a directory with tons of sub-directories and files and perform operations with the command line to search the directory for files etc.

I’m still not sure if I’m going to do this or not, but I do think it would be helpful for this course. I know for me at least, I don’t spend a lot of time with unix/linux (or at least I didn’t before this course), so I don’t have a lot of the useful commands memorized. It would be helpful for me to have spent more time on the commands and really get them ingrained in my head. A few more assignments on this might have helped.

Now this may be just me – other people may not have this problem. I do tend to forget things quite easily. . .

This was one of my first experiences dealing with processes and fork and exec. Interesting enough it came right after one of my assignments in 3574 that dealt with threads. It’s funny how things in different courses start lining up – almost like they planned it that way.

I thought it was an interesting assignment and good that it wasn’t too hard. I would have finished it without to much problem but I forgot to close the pipes. Once I got that done it all worked nicely.

Here are my poems for the everyone’s a poet assignment. I’m no poet, so please don’t judge to harshly 🙂

Haiku:

Programs should work well

Together and by themselves

with text to connect

Limerick:

Learning Unix when I’m used to Windows

Was difficult, proving to be a challenging foe

But I soon learned the new rules

And the benefits of the command line tools

Although I still think the exit button on the right side, is where it should go.

For our final project we decided to create a game hub that we could import old games made last year for this class and keep track of the high scores, etc. It will be interesting to see how we will be able to import old games and what code we will have to change to make them compatible with our hub. That will probably be the most important part –  figuring out how to make it easy for a game developer to add code to their game (or for us to be able to add it easily) so that it can be added to the hub.

We decided that we would first set up the hub to work locally unless we have more time. It will be interesting to see how this plays out as the semester comes to an end. I know we all have busy schedules so it’s going to be difficult to meet up and get this project done. Well, first thing’s first – get started.

So this week we started getting into creating and compiling C++ in Unix. I’m kind of glad because this is material that I am familiar with (at least the C++ part). I’ve done some work with C++ in Unix in ECE 3574 which I am taking now. But most of that work is in Qt IDE, so it is a little different.

I’m actually surprised at how much time I am spending using Ubuntu rather than windows. Between 3574 and this class, I probably spend an equal amount of time in both. And I find that when I am done working on a project in Ubuntu, I tend to stay there and use it. It’s pretty crazy that after a little more than half a semester, I feel almost as comfortable in Ubuntu as I feel in Windows, which I have been using all my life.

Last week we had the midterm exam for ECE 2524. It went pretty well. I was a little worried about some aspects of the midterm but I think it did a good job at covering everything we’ve learned so far. I did great on all of the command parts and I mostly only struggled on the bash script and a little on the python problems. I couldn’t remember doing anything with writing scripts so I was definitely rusty – the only experience I had was a little bit of studying I did after I saw an example question on the example midterm that was on writing a bash script. So that went a little poorly for me, but overall I did great on the midterm and I think that it really helped me see how much I have actually learned in half a semester!

Now, looking forward, we only have half a semester left! Which means I need to make more blog posts! Just kidding. I will try to be more consistent though.

So for the past couple of weeks in class we have been learning about python, using a textbook called “Learn Python the hard way.” The basic idea behind the book is to get you to simply type up all of the code, and THEN turn around and figure out what it does. While it does take a while to do, I really like this style of learning. It forces you to memorize syntax etc. by repetition. I normally have a really hard time switching between languages because I don’t remember the syntax very well. Repeatedly typing these little programs has helped alot with learning Python though.

Our last two homeworks were python programs. The first one was pretty easy and the second one was conceptually easy, but I ended up having a hard time working with argparse. I feel like it is something that should have been easy, but I had trouble with it. I finally got most of it to work. In the future I’ll try and allow myself more time so I can read up on things that are unfamiliar to me.

Overall though I’m really liking Python –It’s a powerful and fun language.

Disclaimer: This was supposed to be posted last week. Forgot to finish it. Woops.

This week in Intro to Unix, we were given a table with our names in it and each person was given a letter. Another table had a list of commands and each person had to learn the commands in the column that corresponded to their letter in the previous table. Then when we came to class we all got into groups where each person in the group had one of the letters and we all shared with each other the commands that we had learned.

I think in theory this excercise would have worked really well. It was nice that we got to focus on a select few of all the commands in the list. However, we didn’t really have enough time in class to share our commands with each other in an efficient way. Our group decided to make a Google doc and each put our commands on there with descriptions of what the command does and what flags might go with it. I think that worked pretty well, as we can all now go and print off a convenient table of the commands we were supposed to learn with the descriptions.

I personally think that the best way to learn to commands is simply to practice with them. It’s harder for me to visualize and think about commands, then it is for me to learn by doing. Plus typing them over and over helps get them ingrained in your mind.