Linux and DOTA Beginners Guide in C Language

Recently, I opened my computer, entered Linux, and started writing C code with the vi editor. I was halfway through when my classmate called me to play DOTA… Then, I rebooted, entered XP, and opened Warcraft.

Before I knew it, exams were approaching again, and time had passed too quickly. This semester seemed to have flown by, and it was already coming to an end. Several elective courses were about to conclude, and as a result, I had a growing number of papers to write. If I wasn’t careful, the total number would soon reach double digits. So, I had to find a dark and windy night to open Word and link together several fragmented pieces of content from various web pages using my ingenious transitional phrases. I pieced them together, modified the original text’s pronouns, and voilà! A bizarre article with a bull’s head, a horse’s face, a lion’s body, and a tiger’s tail was born. Of course, during this process, I frequently checked the word count. I finally managed to scrape something together, although I didn’t even want to read the article myself.

When writing C code, I discovered that I really couldn’t understand the computer’s thought process. Initially, I tried to think ahead and break down the computer’s tasks into steps before writing the code line by line. However, as the problems became more challenging, I started to rely on intuition. This approach led to a plethora of errors when compiling with GCC. I spent about 10 times more time debugging than writing the program. If I was lucky, I could fix the errors; otherwise, I had to start from scratch. Eventually, I felt exhausted when dealing with arrays and pointers, and when faced with recursion, I realized my own limitations.

Lately, I’ve been playing DOTA in moderation, but sometimes I still can’t resist. I’ve played several more games, and now I feel that playing DOTA is indeed a huge waste of time.

In the Introduction to Measurement and Control course, the teacher passionately discussed the future of this major, saying that we would either soar like a phoenix or end up as a cooked chicken. Haha, I love this major.

It’s been a while since I last wrote, and in a few days, I’ll post some of the papers I’ve written as a memento of my Ctrl+C Ctrl+V achievements.

Good luck to all the students taking the college entrance exams!