Well, I’ve had a good day so far. Managed to get in to the server and camp the admin with a few m8s and have a good time. We’ve really been getting a lot of abuse reports for some reason. Oh wellz I hope it settles down soon. Didn’t get to run my Sunday training session b/c I had to walk the dogs but at least we got some Elemental work done.
Been flying ’round Google, Wikipedia, and the OSI site. I love finding good stuff to read ! Spent most of the other day working on my logging app. It’s a simple gizmo mentn to read and write entries from the “Captains-LOG” file I keep under /var/log. Yeah I watched a lot of star trek in the day so sue me 😛
I’ve haven’t worked on the thing in awhile not since I started on the C Standard Library. That was a good while back. I’ve always had problems trying to implement functions analogous to the head, tail, and cat commands but I’ve made some progress. At first I tred to wrap up a copy of FreeBSDs src/usr.bin/head/head.c to include in the file, was kinda shocked I didn’t screw up. Moved every thing into a sub-dir so I wouldn’t lose the header for doing it. I managed to get a perfectly working head going if I called my program with the -t option and the file name. Other wise it didn’t work. I’ve tried toying around with the code and only succeeded in breaking it, well thats the joy of being a noob I suppose. Ripped it all out and started from stratch, got a toFP function for trying to readln the top of the file, based on the head program but alais problems getting it to stick it all on stdin. I’ll get it strightened out some day I’m learning more and more as we go along. When I first started with trying to convert my shell script to a C program the whole File I/O was bran new to me. I can all ready see how a ruby script would be better then C for this but I want it in C, it helps me develop my mind.
I’mg etting better at reading the code in FreeBSDs userland. I usually like to poke around a few things, FreeBSD, Vim, Nano e.t.c. If ya gotta be a newbie with out a teacher or a professional education. May as well get some good reading material !! I really like it, even if I don’t understand every nuounce of it now. I still can follow the jist of how its working. Plus the more I read it and the more I toy with my compiler the more I learn. Man, I’d love some day to try and pick up a language by just using a cheat sheet reference of it and playing around trying to see how it works by exploring it. I study many languages in varing degrees. I started with C++ because it’s what I had heard the most about. I don’t particulary care for C++ but it was a good start. To be honest I wish I had tried to learn SHell scripting first but I didn’t even know the word UNIX back then. Eventually in my bored lazy way of procastination I picked up enough basics of Perl to be able to read stuff better. I had a really old book about learning Java and programming Java Applets that dated back to like, the HotJava web browser. Way back then you needed HotJava or the soon to be finished new version of Netscape to run Java Applets ! SO yeah it’s an old old book but its a fun read. Learning about Java from it thought me two things. Java is a good language and I hate writting it. I love to see software written in Java but I can’t stand writting it and some pure Java programs are har don me peepers. So I learned to read source code a lot better but have only ever written a few lines of Java and don’t plan on writting many more without need !
C always held a bit of a wonder for me, I used to think “Hmm if this is C++ what is C like?” Well one day I found a little tutorial that introduced me to the language. The unusual sense of humor when trying to show the basics of a programming language kept me coming back to it for more data. Eventually I just fell in love with C, it’s so dang logical. I make no claims as to being able to code my way out of a paper bag in any language but I love C. It’s also fun to read programs sources and learn from it. Python, a language I had always been reccomended to try is one I tried to avoid. One time I tried learning it, when on a very rare for me vacation. The white space thing wasn’t as bad as I thought but I don’t like the language. Just not my bag, very good language to work with though. For some very odd reason, I don’t know why I think I must’ve been rumaging around Wikipeda and I desided to try learing Ruby. Yeah I was bored at the time so I had the time to start. My first look at Ruby was when trying to find just the right language for me to start in (people said Python or Java). I hated the site of Ruby code so I never tried it. Yet once I started writting it that day I started to like it. I find I can do a lot more a lot faster in Ruby the nother languages but I pay the price of not being familer with it the way I am with C. When I look around section 3 of the FreeBSD manual I know what I’m dealing with, in Ruby its not always the same. I love Ruby very much now and hope to consintrate my studies on C, SH, and Ruby. One day on a whim I popped over to W3 Schools and started reading about the fundimentals of HTML. Starting to get interested in XHTML/CSS now actually.
Not sure what my future holds for any thing but I remeber the simple fact. The better one reads the easier one learns to write. TTFN chores a shore!