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 Progress Report: 10-20-00When I started this project for CornDancer, one of my first ideas was to publish a progress report. It was supposed to be released almost daily with the purpose of charting my progress in the computing world. So far, I haven't met the original goals I set for myself. I just haven't published like I thought I would. I have a remedy for this lack of motivation: Do it. A great deal has happened since the last progress report, published here almost a month ago. I have greatly improved my c++ coding skills, learned a great deal about Linux, started a Legacy software webpage, began learning Perl, received my midterms, and turned my laptop into a lean mean code crunchin' machine. When I took C++ in high school, I had to teach myself. It was an independent study class, and the book wasn't great for that kind of teaching. Despite the course limitations, my experience with c++ in high school taught me the basics, but the technique I needed was never demonstrated to me. Once I got into college and started taking Computer Science 1, my programming skills improved drastically. I'll be the first one to tell you that I'm not the best programmer in the world, but I'm working on it. We've gone over all the loops, all of the datatypes, and we're currently working on multi-dimensional arrays. Needless to say, I'm liking it. I guess the whole thing with me learning a great deal about Linux is a given. It is my operating system of choice, and it is what I do all of my work on (excluding at school). I've begun to move away from the IDE (integrated development environment) that I grew used to while programming in KDE and previously in Microsoft Windows. I now compile all of my home programs with gcc (GNU compiler collection), which is designed to compile c, c++, fortran, and other languages. It is text based, so I experienced a culture shock when I first started working with it. When I enrolled in college, I told myself that I was going to get serious. While in high school, my grades weren't all that good. I almost lost my chance to come to college. Now I have to pay for school out of my own pocket, which isn't cheap. I decided that since it was my money, I wasn't going to waste it. I think my point was proven when I received my midterm grades.
On the 15th of October, my friend Casey was trying to find a distribution of Linux for his laptop. It has a 25mhz processor with just under 4mb of RAM. Well, needless to say, it was almost impossible to find anything that would run on his computer. This gave me the idea to create a project to find such software. The project is still in the works, so I will get back to that one at a later date (I PROMISE!). If you still wish to view the site, click here On the 16th of October, I made a boo-boo. While copying some binaries onto my UMSDOS version of Linux on my laptop, I accidentally replaced some vital CVS folders. Needless to say, Linux didn't like that very well and wouldn't behave. So I had to delete the distribution from my computer. At first, I planned to simply re-install the UMSDOS distribution (called PYGMY), but then I decided to reformat the whole thing and do a base install of Slackware. Here is the kicker: my laptop only has a floppy drive. Any semi-current distribution of Linux is MANY megs. Fortunately, Slackware had its base installation, the bare essentials, in diskette sized packages. After downloading 17 disks worth of material, I began the typical adventurous installation of Slackware. I installed an older version of gcc on the laptop (also put into diskette sized packages). Now I have a laptop with a pretty good distribution of Linux, and a great compiler. This means that I get to code at the coffee shop. 8^) That pretty much wraps up what I've been doing the last few weeks. I've been hard-at-work on a few new articles, one of which is already published in the "Articles" section in the menu bar. My goals:
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