Funny business 23: Hacking

“It is every geek’s destiny to have his/her patience tested by Linux”

“I just know” a frustrating answer that I’ve been hearing from the Linux developers whenever I ask how they know certain technical details. “I just know”. I thought they were just being a cocky geek, but I noticed that I’ve started saying it as well.

How do I describe this. Linux is logical, even though I did not personally implement or write any code, because of its nature, it is easy to guess the different ways that something can be implemented. Once that is established, the only thing left is to run tests to see which of your assumption rings true. Most of the time I am dumb struck at why certain obvious implementations are left blank, but most often than not, I am just awe struck at my own ability to solve the problem.

I remember this one instance, when I thought about what I was doing. Something I’ve never done before, yet I am so sure that it is the way to do it. I didn’t panic when minor setbacks prevented the system from booting. I know how to recover the system, check the log, correct mistakes as single user and reboot. It didn’t phase me that I might have destroyed the hardware or something or the fact that I have corrupted the MBR and other sectors. A year ago, I would just reformat and reinstall XP, but nowadays I took it as a challenge to see if I could just modify a few files with vi to revive it.
“I was confident of the solution even though I’ve never done it once”
Playing with linux feels like playing with an OS that has all of the options yet nothing is automated for you. I miss window’s plug and play but at the same time, I really enjoy the lessons I learned while debugging this mess. Especially the bugs in kernel space. I was probably just lucky. But then again, I’ve been lucky with all the bugs that I fixed.