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First year of my study (application development) (5 years ago).
We were finally starting getting courses on using Linux and the teacher knew I was already using it for a while so he said that I had to finish the assignment but could work on whatever I wanted next to that.
Assignment was installing a server, getting a web server up and running and compiling at least one program from source.
I setup the server in 20 minutes, wrote a script to do the rest for me and was finished in half an hour. (we got 10 weeks for this (1 hour every week officially))
Well, I was about to start doing my own shit when people started asking me for help.
Fuck it, I love helping people with the things I'm passionate about so sure!
For weeks, during that one hour, I was probably the second teacher. Got called all over the classroom and helped people with everything.
Afterwards (the course), most people said that I probably helped about the whole class pass that course and I got called the linux God etc.
From that day on, my nickname at my study, which even many teachers used was: Mr. Linux.
It felt awesome though!
And still whenever I visit that place again, one teacher always goes: Hello again, mr. Linux!12 -
!rant
A rather long(it's 8 hrs long to be precise) story
So I just finished an amazing homework assignment. The goal was to open a new shell on Linux using a C program. We were asked to follow instructions from http://phrack.org/issues/49/14.html . However the instructions given were for 32 bit processors and we had to do same for 64 bit machines. In a nutshell we had to write a 64 bit shell code and use buffer-overflow technique to change the return address if the function to our shell code.
I was able to write my own shellcode within 1hr and was able to confirm that it's working by compiling with nasm and all. Also the "show-off-dev" inside me told me to execute "/bin/bash" instead of "/bin/sh"(which everyone else was going to do). After my assembly code was properly executing shellcode, I was excited to put it in my C code.
For that, I needed opcodes of assembly code in a string. Following again the "show-off-dev" inside me, I wrote a shell script which would extract the exact opcodes out of objdump output. After this I put it in my C code, call my friend and tell him that "hell yeah bro, I did it. Pretty sure sir is gonna give me full marks etc etc etc". I compiled the code and BOOM, IT SEGFAULTS RIGHT IN FRONT OF MY FRIEND. Worst, friend had copied a "/bin/sh" code from shellstorm and already had it working.
Really burned my ego, I sat continuously for 8 hrs in front of my laptop and didn't talk to anyone. I was continuously debugging the code for 8 hrs. Just a few minutes ago, I noticed that the shellcode which I'm actually putting in my C code is actually 2 bytes shorter than actual code length. WHAT THE F. I ran objdump manually and copied the opcodes one by one into the string (like a noob) and VOILA ! IT WORKED !!!
TURNS OUT I DIDN'T CUT THE LAST COLUMN OF OPCODES IN MY SHELL SCRIPT. I FIXED THAT AND IT WORKED !!
THE SINGLE SHITTY NUMBER MADE ME STRUGGLE 8 HRS OF MY LIFE !! SMH
Lessons learnt :
1)Never have such an ego that makes you think you're perfect, cuz you're retarded not perfect
2)Examine your scripts properly before using them
3)Never, I repeat NEVER!! brag about your code before compiling and testing it.
That's it!
If you've read this long story, you might as well press the "++" button.6 -
Being a linux user, writing a college assignment on Debian operating system, while being on a debian system, studying never felt so good before.
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This is why I don't use and will probably never use Python.
Back in the uni days, I had a very important assignment. It determined whether I was going to the fourth grade from the third or not. It involved math and charting. It was very complex, and I spent a very long time on research, naturally. I knew Python 3, and I decided to use it. The only lib I needed was matplotlib, which I installed with pip. So I did the whole thing, tested it again at home, closed my laptop and was ready to go. My laptop used Windows 7 and was set up to ignore the lid closing. When I closed it, nothing would happen, even the screen stayed on. When I arrived at the lab, I opened my laptop, hit Ctrl + B as usual… and matplotlib import wasn't working. I obviously panicked, I tried to do something about it, but it just kept throwing an import error. Reinstalling the library didn't help. My friends too weren't able to help me. It just wasn't working, and that was it.
I failed the assignment, automatically. I had nothing to show. This was the first time I failed anything in the uni. Later I rewrote the code in C++ with Qt plotting library, and everything worked fine.
I never used Python since. I did everything uni with C++, and later with JavaScript. I don't care if it was Windows error or Python's. My Windows install was clean, I reinstalled it pretty much every year and kept the default settings. My laptop was for studying purposes only, and all my personal life happened on my desktop.
I didn't use exotic things like PyPy. It was just Python 3, the most basic, official installation. If you promote your fucking language as a cross-platform solution, please be bothered to make its basic behaviour stable on the most popular OS out there.
I will probably never use Python again. Maybe this issue was addressed and fixed. Maybe it wasn't. Maybe it never would've happened on Linux or Mac. I don't care. It's like maintaining friendship with a person that betrayed you. I just can't do it.
JS and NPM never failed me.6
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