My life is virtual… DOT COM

Computers are an amazing thing. Society has pretty much accepted them these days as much as they have washing machines and microwaves. And much like those more primitive devices, to the vast majority of people, computers are magic boxes.

This is how it should be! And as a programmer, it is my job to keep it this way. If we had to know exactly how cars worked to drive them from Point A to Point B, it would take years before we’d make it to nice restaurants in faraway big cities.

Like cars and many other things in life, however, if one wants to gain more knowledge, control, power, and–dare I say–joy out of this magic, digging deeper is essential. I won’t go into all the practical reasons why this is the case; if you are reading this, I will assume that there is more you want to accomplish with computers. Maybe you want to be able to troubleshoot problems yourself when they come up. Maybe you want to make certain tasks automated, or make something easier for yourself or others. Whatever the reason, learning how to manipulate your computer on a deeper level (henceforth referred to as “hacking,” which is what this word really means, and not what Hollywood thinks it means) is a rewarding experience.

So, where to start?

That is the question. Obviously to some extent, this depends on what you want to accomplish. But as that is impossible for me to ascertain for each individual, I will endeavor to introduce some things that should be useful to anyone.

These ramblings will assume you are using a Unix-based system, preferably Linux. This is partially because such systems give you the tools to hack out of the box, and partially because their communities are not only amiable to hackers, but are made up of them. Linux is built under the principle that anyone who wants to explore software deeper (and change it if they want) can (and should!) do so. Mac OS X is a Unix under the hood, so it’s acceptable.

The Shell

Any aspiring hacker should become acquainted with the shell. What is this shell of which I speak? You may know it as “the command line.” It’s called a shell because it provides a nice way to interface with your operating system, much in the same way an eggshell provides a nice way to interface with an egg. The shell is accessed through a program called the terminal.

What is a terminal?

Very simply, a terminal receives input from you, and sometimes tells you something back. In the early days of computers, there would only be one real “computer” at a given establishment. Multiple people interacted with this computer simultaneously through dumb terminals, which were not individual computers themselves, but (essentially) monitors and keyboards–ways to tell something to the computer, and get something back. Likewise, you can open as many terminals into your computer as you want: they don’t affect each other, they just affect your machine.

Nowadays, when you open a terminal program, it automatically starts a shell for you. But let’s talk about how to use both.

Getting friendly with your terminal

Terminals are quite basic programs from the perspective of the user (you). But if you want to use one, you should know where to find it! In Ubuntu, it’s in Applications -> Accessories -> Terminal. On OS X, it’s called Terminal.app, in Applications -> Utilities. If you can’t find it on your system, and Google isn’t helping, let me know.

Once you’ve got it open, you will want to spend a bit of time configuring it to your liking. Very important to me are the colors: if you’re going to be doing powerful hackery things, you should look the part! I prefer amber text on black background, but use whatever you like. Again, exactly how to do this is specific to your system, but your terminal program should have an easily-findable preferences menu somewhere. Also make sure the size and whatnot is to your liking. Note that you will want to make sure to use a monospace (fixed-width) font (which certainly will be the default for your terminal). Since you are only dealing with text and not graphics, it’s important that all the letters be the same width so everything lines up correctly.

Getting friendly with the bash shell

There are several different popular shells for a given system, with varying capabilities that you don’t need to worry about now. Just stick with bash, which is the default shell in OS X and almost all Linux distributions. That is, when you open your terminal, you are now looking at a bash shell.

In the world of the shell, the first thing that’s important to understand is that you are always working in a specific place in your system. That is, you are in your Documents directory, or the root directory, or the directory called /usr/local, or whatever. (Note that we call them “directories,” not “folders,” though they both do the same job of being a place where files are.) This is different from your normal computer-using experience, where you don’t often deal directly with files (except to save or open them), really.

Your current location should be displayed at the prompt, or the actual line that is waiting for your input.

The other important thing to keep in mind is not only where you are, but who you are. In unix-like systems, users have varying levels of privileges–that is to say, not everybody can do everything. This is important for security and privacy: you can’t delete another user’s files, or destroy something important to the operation of the whole system, when you are just a standard user. This is a Good Thing, and you’ll want to shun the ability to do dangerous things until you are sure what you’re doing.

Who you are is also displayed at the prompt, generally by means of the symbol (usually $ or #) that immediately precedes your cursor.

So, what do you do now? Well, it’s a command line, so you enter commands!

What are these commands?

Generally, giving a command is as simple as telling the shell which program you want to run. For example, a very common command is one to list which files are in your current directory. To do this, you just type the name of the program that lists files: ls. Then hit enter. The results of running the program will be displayed. Try it on your terminal!

Of course, often you will want to give the program some information about what you want. With the ls program, for example, we often would prefer the files to be arranged in a nice table, instead of just haphazardly listed like in the example above. To tell a program something, you give it parameters. The parameter that does what we want for ls is -l. You put parameters after the program’s name, separating each one with a space. So typing ls -l gives us:

By default, the ls program doesn’t list hidden files, because they are… well, hidden. But of course, sometimes you want to be able to see hidden files! So you pass the parameter -a (which stands for “all,” meaning we want to show ALL files). So we type ls -a and it Enter.

Ruh-roh! It showed all the files, but it’s back to that ugly output again. Looks like we need to combine this new parameter with the previous one. This turns out to be a very common thing to do. We could do this ls -l -a to get what we want. Try it.

But hackers are always looking for speedier/more efficient ways to do things, and so there are often shortcuts. When you have multiple parameters starting with a dash (-), you can scrunch em all together, like so: ls -la. The result is the same.

In the future, we’ll do more complex stuff with the shell, but these basic techniques of using the program name followed by optional parameters are ubiquitous.

What is scripting?

You may ask what the advantage is to typing commands and getting their results as text instead of using graphics. Obviously both have their strong points, but the command method has a major plus: you can script it.

Scripting is the process of doing the work once, and enjoying the benefits multiple times. It is making a list of commands that you can later execute just by typing the name of the script (with optional parameters… sound familiar?)

Scripts are commonly used to automate tasks. For example, you might write a script to backup your important documents to another location. If you’ve ever tried to consistently (daily, for example) do such backups just using your graphical file browser, you know how tedious this can be–eventually, you start backing up less frequently (or not at all) because it’s such a pain in the butt.

Let’s say that to you, “backing up” just means copying your Documents directory into a directory called Backups that’s on a different hard drive. That way, if your main hard drive dies, at least you have copies in another spot. That’s painless to do via the graphical interface, right?

1. Open file browser.
2. Click through folders until you get to Documents.
3. Right click on the folder, select “Copy.”
4. Click through folders on your other hard drive until you get to Backups.
5. Right click in the folder, hit Paste.

How would we do the same thing in the shell?
cp -R /path/to/Documents /path/to/Backup

Alright, you say. That might be faster, but it’s a lot of typing! Well, for one thing, the shell helps you out a lot: you can just start typing a little bit of the word, then hit Tab, and it will complete the word for you. So you can probably just type “D” and then hit Tab, and it will fill in the full word “Documents” automatically.Or, you can just write a script that has the above command in it, name it something like backup, and all you have to do is type “backup” at the command line, and you’re done!

But now let’s say you notice you’re having space issues. Keeping a full second copy of all your stuff means using twice the hard drive space. It’d be nice if you could compress the backups so that they took up less space.

In this scenario, most likely your workflow in the graphical interface has completely changed. It depends on how integrated your archiving program is with your file explorer. For the sake of hyperbole, let’s pretend it’s not integrated at all. Here are the steps for doing it graphically:

1. Open archive program.
2. Go to File -> Add to Archive.
3. Click through folders until you get to Documents.
4. Click OK.
5. Go to File -> Save As.
6. Click through folders until you get to Backups.
7. Think up a name, hit Save.

That last step is important: how are you going to name your backups? Are you going to put today’s date in the name, so that you have easy access to a given day’s backup? I’ve done exactly this before, in the above way listed (or pretty close), and it’s tedious.

Let’s see how we’d change our previous little one-line script (backup) to do the same thing, including the date in the name of the backup.

tar czf /path/to/Backup/`date +%F`.tgz /path/to/Documents

Now when you run backup, your documents are automatically archived and stored in your Backup directory with the name of today’s date. Neat, huh? Once you change the script once, you are done–you still just run backup like you did before. It figures out the date and everything for you.

But now the truly cool thing that really puts you ahead of the graphical way: you can tell your system to simply run backup for you. That’s right, now you don’t have to open the shell, don’t have to type anything–and you never worry about forgetting to do a backup. Telling the system to run your script is quite easy, but I won’t mention it here, as I’ve made my point. Obviously this doesn’t just apply to backups, but for any task that needs doing more than once–and you’d be surprised how many of those there are.

Anyway, hopefully that helps to give you a taste. I’ll gladly answer any emails with questions, and will give a more “hands-on” tutorial next time.

Vaguely Instructional *nix, hacking, scripting, tutorial

Many of you have been curious about what exactly it is I’m going through, and the conclusions I’ve reached after much analysis and help from others (especially Marc who, having tread a similar path, is able to recognize the roadsigns). What I’m going to talk about are conclusions I’ve arrived at that were not easy in coming. There have been many months of doubt, confusion, and wild goose chases. And all is not likely yet discovered, but I think it’s a start.

What I still lack is a definitive diagnosis from a qualified professional as to the specific name for what it is I have. From my research, however, there is very good evidence that the main thing that’s keeping me from the life I’d prefer to lead is a form of OCD called “Pure O.”

Society’s picture of OCD is of someone who needs their crap in a certain spot or they get “bugged,” or someone who washes their hands compulsively or suffers from extreme perfectionism. Indeed, when we think of the term “obsess” in the standard English sense, we associate it with either a sort of incessant worrying, or a focus that demands constant priority: “he’s obsessed with getting good grades,” “quit obsessing over how your hair looks,” “romance novels had become an obsession for her.”

These definitions had been getting in the way of my realizing what “obsession” means for me, in terms of the disorder I have. There were some other big barriers as well, which I will discuss in a bit.

First, I’d like to attempt to convey that which cannot be conveyed: “how it feels.” Obviously if you don’t have a frame of reference, it’s not really going to make sense: you will, as I did, only be able to see the results, and as such will attempt to apply the wrong solutions.

As a programmer, I hope you will excuse the programming analogy when I say that when the effects of the disorder are upon me, it’s like my brain (or at least a significant part of my brain) is stuck in an infinite loop, or that a “program has become non-responsive.” For you Windows users, it’s like my cursor has turned into an hourglass. (For you Mac users, a beach ball.) (You Linux users, of course, have never had programs mess up, so just try and bear with me.)

In other words, it’s as if something is going on in my subconscious that is preventing me from being able to make what should be a very simple decision. The effects are so strong, that they even manifest themselves physically: I become incredibly tired, as if I haven’t slept all night, even if I got plenty of sleep. When the situation causing it is over, I am suddenly no longer sleepy at all. When it is going on, you will likely see me (possibly already dressed and ready to go to wherever) sitting down, staring at the floor, concentrating very hard.

Though some situations always trigger it (like going to school or church), others only do sometimes. I haven’t quite figured out yet all the nuances, but there’s been times that it’s triggered even when I was attempting to do something very innocuous. I could tell tales of sitting in the car, already in the BYU parking lot, trying to force myself to just walk in the door to play the organ (something I enjoy a lot). One occasion took almost two hours for me to get out.

Now would be a good time to address some of the things that this experience is not, because I can already tell that some of you reading this are formulating opinions or passing judgment or readying motivational speeches.

• It is not laziness. This was the one that had me fooled for the longest time. I don’t have a good opinion of myself anyway, and naturally I assumed that I was just being a slacker or something. To further complicate matters, I really am lazy sometimes. But I’ve come to start to realize the difference between the two. Note that the end RESULT is quite similar to laziness, i.e. not getting something done or letting someone down (more on this in a bit). However, the crucial difference lies in how to deal with it. Laziness can be overcome with proper motivation and/or willpower. “Just get in the car and go,” “people are counting on me,” “I have nothing better to do,” “this NEEDS to get done,” “this is important to me,” “I will reward myself if I go,” etc. These are all good things to tell yourself when you are looking at doing something you don’t want to do, or procrastinating, or general laziness. I use these strategies to make myself get to the gym, and they work much of the time.
• It is not anxiety. This is another thing that can cause us to hesitate or, in some cases, be unable to do something. Again, I’ve also in the past mistakenly put the blame here, because I do have certain anxieties, some of which can be quite strong at times. However, I’ve also learned to spot some differences between when I’m fearful of going somewhere, and when my brain is illogically beachballing. I suppose it is possible that certain subconscious anxieties are at the root of the disorder triggering, but in any case it’s not a conscious thing, like stage fright or fear of social awkwardness.
• It is not depression. I have been depressed enough in the past where I’ve literally had no motivation to live, much less get out of bed and go somewhere. When you are depressed, you tend to lack the motivation to do things. Here is what is tricky: I do tend to suffer from depression, negativity, and self-loathing. Additionally, failing to achieve what I want to achieve in life is a major cause of depression for me. When you fail to do something because you are depressed, this increases the depression, because you’ve failed again. Similarly, the disorder I have can and does quite often lead me to depression, because of how it hampers my ability to do things.

All of the above issues are present in me and need work. But even many of you reading this struggle with them and are still able to do much of what is important to you. Indeed, I have been successful (sometimes on my own, sometimes with the help of others) in being able to do certain things that the above issues have made much more difficult.

But this is a different beast. I’m definitely not saying there’s no way to deal with it (if so, I’m screwed). But I haven’t yet found that way. I’m certainly not the only one to have this, though, and there remains a lot to be tried.

In the meantime, I want to address something I said above. When it all comes down to it, it doesn’t matter if I’m sick or crazy or broken or lazy or scared if the end result is the same. That is, I’d like to liken it to someone who is vulgar compared to someone with Tourette’s:

Certainly, most would agree that the person who suffers from Tourette’s is less “to blame” for his outbursts than someone who is merely crude and inconscientious. However, everyone would agree that you don’t hire either of them to be a greeter at Wal-mart.

Therefore, I recognize that in the end, I’m a loser, whatever the reason is. However, I feel that this may not always be the case, and in the meantime I hope this has served a bit to educate those who are tempted to send me emails about how I just need to try harder or something. Quite frankly, I appreciate the sentiment, but that sort of advice only serves to make me feel even worse. I want very much to be able to get an education, be in a relationship, hold a steady job, and attend church regularly. I would go so far as to say that really that’s all I want out of life. I would hope that those who read this would not dismiss my hitherto failure in these areas as a result of lack of desire, motivation, or, yes, even effort.

I’m planning to continue counseling and medicine, starting meditation and image therapy, and building up to things that are tough instead of trying to just do them like a normal person can.

As I see it, some people are born physically weak, some are born stupid, some are born ugly. And some are born with other weaknesses, maybe ones a bit less apparent or prevalent. I hope that there’s hope; really I don’t know. Some who are lame eventually are able to walk, some never are. I genuinely hope I’m not living with my parents in 10 years. But I suppose only time will tell.

Painfully Personal life, ocd, personal