Day 00 (Day 1)

What a day. I got to the campus at 8:25 am for the check in, and I left at 11:25 pm. It was a day full of fun, programming, and new friends!

Check In

After getting there at 8:25, I sat around in the check-in area until 8:42 when a few quick speakers came to give us words of encouragement and info about certain logistics. Overall there were about 300 people present at the check in.

Then we were filtered upstairs where our photos were taken, our accounts activated, and we sat down to code. This all took about an hour.

Field Notes

Throughout the day I documented each of the exercises as I worked through them. Enjoy my field notes!

Ex 00

Done 10:00 am

Pretty simple exercise, just had to send an email with your username

Ex 01

Done 10:08 am

Fairly interesting exercise, had to create a file with specific permissions, heavy use of chmod.

Ex 02

Done 10:50 am

Ex 01 on steroids. Six different files/directories/symlinks that need to match an exact output. Very heavy use of chmod and attention to detail.

Ex 03

Done 12:04 pm

Kerberos Network Authentication System work. Learned about tickets and authenticators. klist command to display the tickets and redirect standard output. Also this is the time I figured out how to configure the github submission setup.

Ex 04

Done 1:00 pm

LDAP, Lightweight Directory Access Protocol API, is what I needed to learn about for this exercise. From there I made an ldapwhoami query.

Lunch

1:00 pm to 2:00 pm

Food at the cantina, 6 bucks for a decent lunch.

Ex 05

Done 2:54 pm

ldapsearch to combined with grep, sort, and sed to find the names of all users starting with the letter z listed alphabetically but in reverse. Quite a fun problem.

Ex 06

Stopped 3:30 pm, Returned 4:38 pm, Done 5:00 pm

LDIF query to update the phone number stored in the LDAP database. The trick was changing one’s host URI with the ldap master address to change the database values stored for your user. I needed a lot of help from others for this.

Ex 07

Done 3:47 pm

Simple ls with extra flags command.

Ex 08

Done 3:55 pm

Very simple cat output file.

Ex 09

Done 4:38 pm

Very fun reverse diff with patch work. Interesting and cool use of part of star wars title sequence.

Ex 10

Done 6:03 pm

Fairly straightforward usage of the man page for find to figure out a complex removal command. Useful for cleaning up extra emacs files. After I finished I spent a lot of time helping others.

Ex 11

Started 7:15 pm, Stopped 8:30 pm, Return 10:00 pm, Done 10:30 pm

Fairly mind bending use of file and magic to create one’s own file type. Help from friends

Dinner

8:30 pm to 10:00 pm

Since the cantina dinner ended at 6:30, I ventured out to i-Tea, a local tea and food place near by. About a 20 minute walk each way. Great boba and great popcorn chicken 10/10.

Concluding Thoughts

A lot was thrown at us pisciners today. No real programming though, a lot of terminal and Unix and informational technology stuff with Bash. Still great to know. A lot of fun, everyone at the piscine is super friendly and hardworking. A lot of people are struggling, with a few who already dropped out. I can’t wait for day 01!