Dark Light

I have three weeks left in this hell-hole, and I cannot wait to leave. I have just been dragged though the most stupidly moronic system ever, and I’m irritated. Let me explain:

I mentioned yesterday that one of the assignments I’m doing is a Shell system for UNIX. The hand in and demo for that was this morning, and we did, and we went though the test. To my intense annoyance, a few of the features that were working last night were not working this morning, but that was secondary to the main problem:

The assignment was to create a shell for UNIX. At Level One, you had to make a series of scripts that would do X, Y and Z. At Level two you had to make “In the level 2 BRIDGES system, a single script runs continuously to interpret the users command. The level 2 system should have all the commands described for the Level 1 system above plus [that] runs continuously to interpret the users command. The level 2 system should have all the commands described for the Level 1 system above plus [U, V and W]”, This to run on *top* of UNIX. So I did. I created a neato-cool system that was helpful, friendly, and nice to use. That remembered your name and told you where you had gone wrong, that had an inbuilt password system.

That Worked.

But also, and here is the key, would run UNIX commands. Basically, if the command you ran was not in the list of commands Brish knew, it would try to run it as a UNIX system. This, I felt, was good, because it gave you the ease of use they desired without killing the power and flexibility of the UNIX prompt.

Do you remember that quote? About “a single script runs continuously to interpret the users command…”. Apparently, that means that it shouldn’t run UNIX commands. At all. So I lost the entire freaking group 40% of the mark.

“But”, I hear you say, “That is how it works in the Real World. You shouldn’t add features you aren’t expressedly told to” and yes, I’d agree. Except for one other part of the marking scheme: “In addition to these requirements, you are free to add features of your own. additional 15% may be awarded for the additional features”.

Additional features gain marks. Oh, Except when they cost you 40%.

Oh yes, and then I came home to find I’d forgotten to log out of the net, at peak time. For 4 hours. ARGH!

Related Posts