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Ben

Tue May 09 2006, 12:29PM

Vigilatny
Registered Member #17 Joined: Thu Feb 02 2006, 02:47PM
Location: NL
Posts: 158

Simon wrote ...

It's an example of the whole Unix philosophy: make everything hard to learn and understand, but really efficient for when you finally understand it.

I don't think its intentionally hard to learn. It's just not the "intuitive" way of doing things. It's the way that will work best. Also most of the early unix tools are written by and for programmers. And a lot of amateurs. And CS majors, and engineers. That seems to be the whole problem, the tools were written by people who understood computers without regard to useability. It's also in my opinion what makes them particularly useful. Who doesn't like regex's, they make magic happen.

Steve Conner

Tue May 09 2006, 03:27PM

Registered Member #30 Joined: Fri Feb 03 2006, 10:52AM
Location: Glasgow, Scotland
Posts: 6706

I'm sure I would love regexp's if I could ever remember how to write one for more than 5 minutes after looking at the documentation.

I'm in the middle of trying to wean myself off Windows/Labview and onto "proper" programming. I've got to the stage at work where the code I'm being asked to write is getting that bit more complex. Right now I have a clash caused by two Labview programs that need to be loaded at once, but they both have a subroutine that goes by the same name, but does a different thing. This causes Labview's JIT compiler to (quite rightly) throw a fit so neither program will run while the other is in memory.

Now if you were editing a C program in vi (or whatever) that would be a 5 second job to fix with a regexp search and replace. But it's going to take me a whole day of pointing and clicking on graphical function calls.

I think I'm going to start getting real friendly with cygwin/mingw and gcc soon. Ew, Creeping *nix

Carbon_Rod

Wed May 10 2006, 03:59AM

Registered Member #65 Joined: Thu Feb 09 2006, 06:43AM
Location:
Posts: 1155

The GCC is a great tool and is used as the engine for AVR and DSPIC compilers among many others. If you have ever played around with various compilers it has to be one of the nicer set of tools you can have around. However, I will tell you now that cygwin has serious limitations for cross compiling binaries with some make scripts.

It can be quite good when combined with apt-get and other tool chains on the debian console (KNOPPIX has it built in too.) I run a minimal debian environment with the tool chains inside a bochs environment with network support (nice -- backups are a simple 8min DVDR write.)

Agreed, if someone has not studied computer science the chances are one will not appreciate its design. Did you read that interview with Tanenbaum â€“ he is such a hypocritical wiener as minix has/had to be the worst OS ever made. Ironically itâ€™s indirectly partially responsible for Linux.

Notably there is much documentation about design etc. However, the development cycle can most definitely not be user friendly as many groups develop an elitist attitude. MSDN is much nicer to its developers, but gets you hooked on using non-standard C libs Microsoft owns.

It is usually the academic environment that produces *nix programmers. As for writing/modifying HPIB or other i/o drivers there are groups that are dedicated to scientific applications.

Just to let you know I would never â€œbeat someone with a stickâ€ -- its called a pipe "|" . =} ...evil grin...

Simon

Wed May 10 2006, 04:56AM

Registered Member #32 Joined: Sat Feb 04 2006, 08:58AM
Location: Australia
Posts: 549

Ben wrote ...

Simon wrote ...

It's an example of the whole Unix philosophy: make everything hard to learn and understand, but really efficient for when you finally understand it.

Perhaps it would have been clearer for me to say: *nix is utility over cuddliness.

I've once thought of starting a "*nix wizardry" thread. Post computing problems and see who can find the most elegant solution to it. I couldn't think of enough clever problem/solutions.

Bjørn

Wed May 10 2006, 06:12AM

Registered Member #27 Joined: Fri Feb 03 2006, 02:20AM
Location: Hyperborea
Posts: 2058

*nix is utility over cuddliness.

Coders generally don't know about things that involves humans. Making a program that is almost impossible to exit without resetting the computer is not utility, it is just plain bad design. The same is using keys combinations that are easy to do on keyboards in a specific language but difficult on other keyboards.

Most of the *nix usability problems stems from ingorance and incompetence, not from any goal of efficiency or utility.

Hellmark

Wed May 10 2006, 09:29PM

Registered Member #189 Joined: Thu Feb 16 2006, 07:43PM
Location: Winfield, Missouri, USA
Posts: 46

almost impossible to close? Uhm, I find it is easier to close Linux stuff than in windows, especially on daemons/services.

Also, when it comes to minix, it was meant to be educational, on learning how an OS works and is made.

Simon

Thu May 11 2006, 12:12AM

Registered Member #32 Joined: Sat Feb 04 2006, 08:58AM
Location: Australia
Posts: 549

BjÃ¸rn BÃ¦verfjord wrote ...

Making a program that is almost impossible to exit without resetting the computer is not utility, it is just plain bad design.

I'm surprised at this one. *nix programs are usually completely sealed off from the OS (unlike in DOS, for example). That means that no matter how fubarred the applications get, there shouldn't be any need to reboot. The most extreme things usually need to get is a SIGKILL. (The exception is some non-*nix root SUID programs that take over the computer and don't do it well.)

I can't think of any time in the past months that I've had to powerdown my FreeBSD box unless I've specifically wanted to but Win98 on my parents' computer seems to crash and burn at a rate of about one in three. (Later versions of Windows seem to be more stable as they are designed with networking in mind.)

Carbon_Rod

Thu May 11 2006, 03:01AM

Registered Member #65 Joined: Thu Feb 09 2006, 06:43AM
Location:
Posts: 1155

â€œ...â€ Correctly pointed out there are problems. Applications and daemons can do funny things -- especially when bad coding allows them to go zombie. The security watchdogs cover many problems in addition to the classics.

Just ignore the FUD about things like â€œrandom number generator problemsâ€ with a Fixed Seed pool â€“ I am surprised this came from academics. Itâ€™s analogous to saying â€œuncut bread is bread that has not been cutâ€ â€“ these people have PHDs in what?.

Keyboard maps are great for loading onto European machines. Correct character placement is better than pulling keys. =] Just about Every language and keyboard is supported. Oh btw: Secretly I hate vi too -- I mean â€œ Shift+;+x â€œto exit was an intuitive design. ;p

If you cook one console â€“ not to worry as most distros automatically load a few consoles. Switching between them is easy as â€œShift+F1â€ in console or â€œCtrl+Shift+F1â€ in KDE. Also F1 to F4 are usually command line, and higher F keys will have the GUI or other special interfaces loaded on them (like handy recent DNS and firewall logs.) Go to another console and login, â€œkill â€“9â€ the PID of the cooked terminal, and most systems will init a fresh new terminal when you logout and switch back.

I like live CDs for two reasons:
1.) Great for daemon, network, and low level design (if you are forced to crash etc..)
2.) If they crash (as they are traditionally unstable) they will not care.

Free network testing of your machines -- win98 can be fun... ;]
Win32:

Other:

Steve Conner

Thu May 11 2006, 08:35AM

Registered Member #30 Joined: Fri Feb 03 2006, 10:52AM
Location: Glasgow, Scotland
Posts: 6706

I agree that *nix boxes are a lot more stable and harder to "bluescreen" than Windows boxes. Badly written programs will often crash themselves, but the great thing is that it hardly ever brings the system down. When I was using *nix I would just smush the dead windows with the "xkill" tool and keep on surfing the net, drinking tea, and asking my office mates annoying questions about how to do stuff in Fortran.

I remember debugging a C program (written by someone else) under Linux. It turned out that it had bad array indexing with no bounds checking, and it was wandering out the end of one of its arrays and writing onto memory that didn't belong to it. Or trying to

Linux stomped on the program at this point and spat out error messages and a core dump. By feeding the program through the gdb debugger a couple of times, I was able to figure out what was going on.

I'm sure Win2k/XP has memory management like this nowadays, and MS development tools have debuggers as good as gdb, but the Linux stuff is all free, how can you resist

Carbon_rod, I couldn't get the nessus.org software to scan anything here

I remember using the Shields Up scanner at grc.com, do you think it's any good?

Bj0rn: Usability is a different problem that traditional computer science doesn't cover. I agree that nix developers may have a lot to learn there. Microsoft and MacOS have usability guidelines that they try to force their developers into. I like this rant by Eric Raymond.

I used to work with the guys who wrote the esp-r building simulation software. They were real nice guys who taught me a hell of a lot about *nix and programming. esp-r was about a million lines of code in a mixture of Fortran and C, that ran under Solaris (although they ported it to Linux with no hassle while I was there) I think it probably had the worst user interface ever. I was required to learn it and it took me about a month of extreme pain >_< I eventually did some development work on it, so if my branch ever got merged, maybe 20 of those million lines could be mine

Chris Russell

Thu May 11 2006, 03:28PM

... not Russel!
Registered Member #1 Joined: Thu Jan 26 2006, 12:18AM
Location: Tempe, Arizona
Posts: 1052

Excellent link, Steve. I laughed, I cried... I've been through the same exact thing so many times! I guess this could be an example of one way in which linux is evil.

Ubuntu doesn't support WPA encryption out of the box, just WEP and unecrypted. WEP is useless; it is trivial to break. Unencrypted just isn't secure enough for me. All my important transactions take place over secure protocols, but I'd still rather some kiddie across the street couldn't sniff, say, my IRC conversations, or the cookie that my browser sends to identify me as the administrator of this website.

At any rate, in order to make it work, you have to download a tool called "wpa_supplicant." Of course, you're not connected to the 'net, so you will have to steal some access from your neighbor's open AP, or you'll have to plug in an ethernet cable. You will have to edit the config file, following the documentation carefully. You will have to generate a WPA key, and you will have to set it up to start when your computer starts. If you're really unlucky, like me, it doesn't work. No apparent reason is given, your network card just doesn't associate with your AP. Even the raw logs don't say much, just "trying to associate" over and over and over. Finally, after googling every possible combination of keywords, you figure out that you will also have to download the source of your latest wireless drivers, and recompile them. Of course, that still doesn't work. More googling reveals that recompiling new drivers doesn't always remove the old drivers, so you'll have to hunt those down and delete them. Then, finally, it works.

Getting my wireless working for the first time took about a day. From then on, it took only about ten minutes to get it set up again every time I did a kernel update. The latest version of Ubuntu, Dapper, has all the drivers I need, so I only had to set it up once (20 minutes or so), and it works. That's a marked improvement, but the problem here is clear: in WinXP, you select "WPA Encryption," enter your passphrase, and it just works. You don't have to know or care about your drivers, about the hex key generated from your passphrase, or anything else. WEP is just as easy to use on linux, but nobody's bothered to put WPA in the GUI yet. It's low priority, since there's a "workaround." Emphasis on "work," I suppose. Astonishingly, the above solution is apparently considered pretty reasonable by a lot of people in the linux camp. For now, I guess I will stick to linux when I want something to work reliably and correctly, and I will stick to WinXP when I want something to work "well enough" very very quickly.

Usability is going to become a larger issue in the coming years for linux, and I am glad that there are distros out there like Ubuntu that are focusing on making linux as usable as possible.

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