Tag Archives: unix

Intro to Unix ECE 2524 Entry #9

Posted on by
Reply

I’ve been enjoying the break finishing up all the current unix assignments before the break began. I guess the last thing I did that I haven’t mentioned yet is the future of unix paper.  I thought this was an interesting paper to write about and research as technology in the future has always been an interest of mine. Upon finishing the paper I didn’t realize that part of the submission was creating a makefile to convert the paper to html and pdf. Since I started this paper in Word I wasn’t sure where to go and how to get it in to markdown format. Turns out markdown format is pretty much just plain text, so I was able to take the plain text file and simply add some white space where paragraphs were needed which wasn’t nearly as bad as I thought it would be. After getting the markdown file, converting it using pandoc was as simple as just googling what the command to do so was. Setting up the makefile after this was a piece of cake.

In 3574, we are getting a bunch of homeworks as he is trying to squeeze everything into these last couple of weeks which is really annoying. So we got stuck with an assignment over break. This proved to be pretty tough especially without being able to go see the TA for help.  The homework was on POSIX message queues.  I managed to set up everything necessary for the homework, but was stuck on one of the most trivial parts. The parameter for the message in the send and receive functions is a char*. I didn’t realize how annoying this was to convert my messages between char*s and QStrings.  Turns out everything I was doing wrong had to do with my error in conversion. I was using the same char* as my send and receive message because I didn’t realize how it was really storing the information into the pointer.  By having 2 char*s, one for receiving, and one for sending, this cleared up the issue. Such a small thing for all the debugging I had to do. Debugging for this homework was extremely annoying since you had to run 4 separate processes of the same program, then a fifth process of a different program. All 5 processes had to be run in a certain order, and remade, and reran every time I made a small change. It would take about 30 seconds just to get to the point where I could rerun the program. I finally got it working though after a few emails with the TA,

Intro to Unix ECE 2524 Entry #7

Posted on by
Reply

It’s been a while since my last post so need to get back on it to be sure I get 10 in before the end of the semester. Haven’t had any assignments in Unix lately which has been a nice break.  I ended up getting the futures paper done to get me some added points to my total grade. I’ve also gotten a fair amount of work done on our battleship final project.  I’ve gotten most of the text based part of the game done and implemented in Qt; this should give us a good base should we have time and choose to implement a GUI.  Error checking is always one of the things I hate most about programming because there’s just so many stupid things that a user could input that you have to check for and handle.  I think I’ve gotten everything covered in terms of inputting bad coordinates and so on. Currently the ships are only one size big, and they need to be re-implemented to the correct size, and error checking needs to be done in terms of placement, i.e. checking for overlap or run off over the screen.

As for 3574, we had our first test this past Thursday which seemed to go pretty well to me.  Most of the information was easily found in the book or online slides from the book, and  I can’t imagine getting a poor grade on this test.  The past homework has been quite difficult, and it took me awhile to get the thing of moving back and forth between different UI forms via signals/slots, and hiding/showing different widgets.  It has however been a lot more fun to write than previous assignments.  Getting used to QtDesigner took me a few minutes, but it is very intuitive, and makes creating GUI’s so much easier than coding them by hand.  As part of the assignment we had to implement tic-tac-toe and write our own algorithm for the computer. I think I have gotten pretty close to if not an unbeatable computer player.  Hopefully the homeworks will remain interesting, but now that I believe we are done with GUI’s, I’m afraid I will lose a lot of my interest.

Intro to Unix ECE 2524 Entry #4

Posted on by
Reply

Not too much happening with Unix this week. No python assignment this week and finished most of project two for ECE 3574 last weekend.  That project was quite annoying seeing that book didn’t make much sense with most of what it wanted you to do. After seeing the TA, I realized how many flaws there were in the books spec. Constructors missing members that they needed, parameters that aren’t specified as to what they are to do, destructors with nothing to destruct, are just a few things among many of the problems with the spec. I guess the only good thing about it is that the program can’t be graded as harshly because the spec is so ambiguous.  Glad to be done with that one though, hopefully the next one is better.

As for ECE 2524, not sure what the next assignment will entail but I’m not looking forward to it after the exercise on Wednesday. I don’t really understand the protocols at all, and I have no idea how to implement them.  I have no idea how to go about creating the project like what was mentioned in the exercise. Hopefully that assignment will make more sense when the spec comes out.

Intro to Unix ECE 2524 Entry #1

Posted on by
Reply

Alright so I guess it’s about time to start the first entry to this blog.  This class is my first experience in Unix, and so my first objective was to install Ubuntu.  Since I already had a virtual box running on my laptop, I figured that would be the fastest ad easiest way to get Ubuntu up and running.  After downloading the ISO file and creating a new partition in the virtual box, all I had to do was simply install it. Once it finished installing, I played around with learning what everything was; I was surprised to see products already installed that were so similar to Microsoft Office.  So far everything has been running smoothly, and I haven’t had any problems.

I began going through the lecture and exercise for week 2 today and found the exercises  to be very intuitive and easy to complete.  Probably took only about 15 minutes to complete  and definitely worth not having to go to class on Monday.  Also started looking at the commands to learn for Wednesday. Some are very self explanatory, while others took a little bit more time to understand as some commands can be used in different ways to do multiple different things.  I’m also programming in Linux for ECE 3574 in the qtcreator.  I may also write about some of my experiences with that throughout the semester as they relate to this class.