Introduction

Well. This is my first "Tech Blog" post, so I suppose I'll give you some background about what this is all about.

As opposed to my other blogs which are about my "life" this blog I will try to keep on the topic of tech savvy things at the least, but at the moment my current focus are programs which can be compiled with gcc. That means my blog title should probably include Windows, but as of yet I've been to lazy to get mingw / mingcc working on my windows environment.

If you see any "tech bias" here it will probably be towards the mac/linux side...BUT, thats mostly because the shell environment in windows is pretty bleh compared to the alternatives. Don't get me wrong, I've taken plenty of windows IT classes.

Speaking of classes: I'm a Computer Science major at Washington State University. I came to WSU in 2002. I was here for a year and a half before I "left" due to academic deficiency (which means kicked out by the way). After a year and a half of Spokane Falls Community College aka SFCC (you are required to leave for a minimum of a year due to academic deficiency) I had quite a new outlook. Looking back on it, I'm glad I got the boot, because it allowed me to get an _ENTIRELY_ new perspective on a lot of things. For my first quarter at SFCC I took IS/IT classes which were quite enlightening and allowed me to learn a lot about windows in a domain environment. The real treat was when I started taking CS classes at SFCC. My teacher through my next 3 quarters of CS at SFCC was John Mill -- who is without a doubt the best computer science teacher I have ever had. I thought I knew quite a bit going in there, but anything that had hurt my brain to think about before SFCC like Binary Search Trees / Advanced Sorting and other topics, all really came together, which helped me to become a coder that likes to carefully consider his approaches before delving headlong into a project. I'm not saying I'm "uberfantastic", But I try to be the best I can. Anywho, going to SFCC really helped to cement the style of thinking that I needed to solve problems with code, without feeling overwhelmed. If there is any skill a coder needs, its not to be overwhelmed...you've just got to loop through the steps to solve the problem after all :)

So anyway. I'm currently in CS 360 422 and 317. To anyone who knows the WSU curriculum that means I'm in one real coding class and two pretty fluffy classes. 317 is my least favorite because its all about things like set theory, automata, etc. Things that make sense to me in practice, but not in theory. 422 is all about "coding in the real world" about testing, etc. Things that you'll have to deal with if you work at places like M$. Not something I look forward to, but not utterly impossible either, and its a pretty fun class anyway. 360 is my favorite class. It's called "operating systems" although its more like "low level coding in c in relation to linx and ext2fs". Anyway you slice it, its superfun, because every time you finish a lab for that class you feel accomplished. And I learn a lot of low level stuff that seems simple after the fact, but to learn on my own would be daunting.

I also have two "tech" jobs. One for student computing...which is basically an IT position, management, fixing, etc of computers -- however since I was just hired this semester, most of my job is sitting swiping people into labs and answering questions...but it still beats the hell out of the 4 years I worked at subway. ( I'm nearly 23 btw -- class of 2002 ). My other job has its IT elements, but is basically a "huge" graduate lab. I mean huge in the sense of how much coding they accomplish/research/etc. the actual "lab" is only about 16 computers. Its been really fun. I started out by re assembling the lab as best as I could. That having been mostly accomplished a couple weeks ago, my attentions turned to my first assignment, which happened to be writing a one way TCP proxy.

Using the knowledge of sockets I gained in 360 writing the initial code skeleton wasnt hard...but doing all the linux tricks that make a program "slick" has taken me days to learn. So over the course of the next few days I'll be discussing these low level linux signal / socket / thread / etc tricks and basic knowledge that I've learned.

So stay tuned :)

(sorry for the boring intro)

-Crusher4