Experience is the best teacher
There are three principal means of acquiring knowledge… observation of nature, reflection, and experimentation. Observation collects facts; reflection combines them; experimentation verifies the result of that combination.
Indeed, we all know that experience is the best teacher. But wait, did you know that experience comes with a lot of mistakes. We love best teachers, but who loves mistakes? Today, is my fourth day in the path towards being a world class developer. I made a mistake, may be the worst I’ve ever made in this SLC period.
Following some tutorial on how to create an authentication system using Flask Security, I encountered a problem: postgres was installed on my system but wasn’t running. I easily made out that it was not running due to some permission error in the /usr directory. I thought that was easy chmod 777 /usr/ . Good, but now I got another error: that I cannot change access mode because I do not own the directory. Easy, geek: chown -R scholar:scholar /usr . When I tried to run postgres and found the same error, I decided to reboot my system. Rebooting my system brought me to dooms day! Now, postgres does not run and a bonus to that is that the network-manager did not start on system reboot.
This is when I often like reassuring myself that, “I’m calm and collected.” No wi-fi connections available? Still easy stuff, sudo service network-manager restart . Boom! I don’t even remember the exact error, but it just said that my sudoer’s file had been corrupted. Google: sudoer’s file corrupted. The first and easiest way to solve the issue is to live boot and replace the existing sudoer’s file with the default one from another system. That’s impossible! When I was installing ubuntu, I remember encrypting my hard disk. That means that I can’t access it from a live booted OS. DEAD END.
By this point, I had clearly understood that I had to reinstall my Operating System. Asking around, I was amazed that even some of my immediate neighbours at home did not know about ubuntu. I had to get live disks from a friend’s place in Nairobi so I just packed some clothes for the weekend and traversed the world!
Finally, I’ve managed to live boot ubuntu, but just as I suspected, I cannot access my hard drive from a live booted OS. Thanks to the knowledge unit on version control and more so thanks to Github, I’ve been able to clone my work and continue just from where I left before experimenting.
Ask me about today’s outputs? I’m starting out now, it’s 10pm. Hope is the last thing I lose. In the spirit of Archmedes’, I’ve got a place to stand, I got to move the earth.
“Give me a place to stand”, said Archmedes, “and I shall move the earth.”
Day 4 just began 😄! TIA!
