Hello All
I recieved a mail from my friend (Regional Engg college Calicut) regarding
askin questions.I think this will help newbies like me !!
Rgds
Din
Hi,
Here is an article by Eric S. Raymond and Rick Moen. I hope it will
be helpful for *newcomers* to the *real* hacking world.
Regards,
Baiju. M
----------------------------------------------------------------------
How To Ask Questions The Smart Way
==================================
Eric Raymond and Rick Moen
Table of Contents
Introduction
Before You Ask
When You Ask
How To Interpret Answers
On Not Reacting Like A Loser
Questions Not To Ask
Good and Bad Questions
_________________________________________________________________
Introduction
In the world of hackers, the kind of answers you get to your technical
questions depends as much on the way you ask the questions as on the
difficulty of developing the answer. This guide will teach you how to
ask questions in a way that is likely to get you a satisfactory
answer.
The first thing to understand is that hackers actually like hard
problems and good, thought-provoking questions about them. If we
didn't, we wouldn't be here. If you give us an interesting question to
chew on we'll be grateful to you; good questions are a stimulus and a
gift. Good questions help us develop our understanding, and often
reveal problems we might not have noticed or thought about otherwise.
Among hackers, "Good question!" is a strong and sincere compliment.
Despite this, hackers have a reputation for meeting simple questions
with what looks like hostility or arrogance. It sometimes looks like
we're hostile to newbies and the ignorant. But this isn't really true.
What we are, unapologetically, is hostile to people who seem to be
unwilling to to think or do their own homework before asking
questions. People like that are time sinks -- they take without giving
back, they waste time we could have spent on another question more
interesting and another person more worthy of an answer. We call
people like this "losers" (and for historical reasons we sometimes
spell it "lusers").
We're (largely) volunteers. We take time out of busy lives to answer
questions, and at times we're overwhelmed with them. So we filter
ruthlessly. In particular, we throw away questions from people who
appear to be losers in order to spend our question-answering time more
efficiently, on winners.
You don't want to be one of the losers. You don't want to seem like
one, either. The best way to get a rapid and responsive answer is to
ask it like a winner -- to ask it like a person with smarts,
confidence, and clues who just happens to need help on one particular
problem.
(Improvements to this guide are welcome. You can mail suggestions to
[EMAIL PROTECTED])
_________________________________________________________________
Before You Ask
Before asking a technical question by email, or in a newsgroup, or on
a website chat board, do the following:
1. Try to find an answer by reading the manual.
2. Try to find an answer by reading a FAQ.
3. Try to find an answer by searching the Web.
4. Try to find an answer by asking a skilled friend.
When you ask your question, display the fact that you have done these
things first; this will help establish that you're not being a lazy
sponge and wasting peoples' time. Better yet, display what you have
learned from doing these things. We like answering questions for
people who have demonstrated that they can learn from the answers.
Prepare your question. Think it through. Hasty-sounding questions get
hasty answers, or none at all. The more you do to demonstrate that you
have put thought and effort into solving your problem before asking
for help, the more likely you are to actually get help.
Beware of asking the wrong question. If you ask one that is based on
faulty assumptions, J. Random Hacker is quite likely to reply with a
uselessly literal answer while thinking "Stupid question...", and
hoping that the experience of getting what you asked for rather than
what you needed will teach you a lesson.
On the other hand, making it clear that you are able and willing to
help in the process of developing the solution is a very good start.
"Can someone provide a pointer?", "What is my example missing?" and
"Is there a site I should have checked?" are more likely to get
answered than "Please post the procedure I should use." because you're
making it clear that you're truly willing to complete the process if
someone can simply point you in the right direction.
Never assume you are entitled to an answer. You are not. You will earn
an answer, if you earn it, by asking a question that is substantial,
interesting, and thought-provoking -- one that implicitly contributes
to the experience of the community rather than merely passively
demanding knowledge from others.
_________________________________________________________________
When You Ask
Choose your forum carefully
Be sensitive in choosing where you ask your question. You are likely
to be ignored, or written off as a loser, if you:
* post your question to a forum where it is off topic
* post a very elementary question to a forum where advanced
technical questions are expected, or vice-versa
* cross-post to too many different newsgroups
Hackers blow off questions that are inappropriately targeted in order
to try to protect their communications channels from being drowned in
irrelevance. You don't want this to happen to you.
_________________________________________________________________
Write in clear, grammatical, correctly-spelled language
We've found by experience that people who are careless and sloppy
writers are usually also careless and sloppy thinkers (often enough to
bet on, anyway). Answering questions for careless and sloppy thinkers
is not rewarding; we'd rather spend our time elsewhere.
So expressing your question clearly and well is important. If you
can't be bothered to do that, we can't be bothered to pay attention.
Spend the extra effort to polish your language. It doesn't have to be
stiff or formal -- in fact, hacker culture values informal, slangy and
humorous language used with precision. But it has to be precise; there
has to be some indication that you're thinking and paying attention.
Spell correctly. Don't confuse "its" with "it's" or "loose" with
"lose". Don't TYPE IN ALL CAPS, this is read as shouting and
considered rude. If you write like a semi-literate boob, you will
probably be ignored. Writing like a l33t script kiddie hax0r is the
absolute kiss of death and guarantees you will receive nothing but
stony silence (or, at best, a heaping helping of scorn and sarcasm) in
return.
If you are asking questions in a forum that does not use your native
language, you will get a limited amount of slack for spelling and
grammar errors -- but no extra slack at all for sloppy thinking. Also,
unless you know what your respondent's languages are, write in
English. Busy hackers tend to simply flush questions in languages they
don't understand, and English is the working language of the net. By
writing in English you minimize your chances that your question will
be discarded unread.
_________________________________________________________________
Send questions in formats that are easy to understand
If you make your question artificially hard to read, it is more likely
to be passed over in favor of one that isn't. So:
* Send plain text mail, not HTML.
* Don't send mail in which entire paragraphs are single
multiply-wrapped lines. (This makes it too difficult to reply to
just part of the message.)
* Never, ever expect hackers to be able to read closed proprietary
document formats like Microsoft Word. Most hackers react to these
about as well as you would to having a pile of steaming pig manure
dumped on your doorstep.
* If you're sending mail from a Windows machine, turn off
Microsoft's stupid "Smart Quotes" feature. This is so you avoid
sprinkling garbage characters through your mail.
_________________________________________________________________
Use meaningful, specific subject headers
On mailing lists or newsgroups, the subject header is your golden
opportunity to attract qualified experts' attention in around 50
characters or fewer. Don't waste it on babble like "Please help me"
(let alone "PLEASE HELP ME!!!!"). Don't try to impress us with the
depth of your anguish; use the space for a super-concise problem
description instead.
Stupid:
HELP! Video doesn't work properly on my laptop!
Smart:
XFree86 4.1 misshapen mouse cursor, Fooware MV1005 vid. chipset
_________________________________________________________________
Be precise and informative about your problem
* Describe the symptoms of your problem or bug carefully and
clearly.
* Describe the environment in which it occurs (machine, OS,
application, whatever).
* Describe the research you did to try and understand the problem
before you asked the question.
* Describe the diagnostic steps you took to try and pin down the
problem yourself before you asked the question.
* Describe any recent changes in your computer or software
configuration that might be relevant.
Do the best you can to anticipate the questions a hacker will ask, and
to answer them in advance in your request for help.
Simon Tatham has written an excellent essay entitled How to Report
Bugs Effectively. I strongly recommend that you read it.
_________________________________________________________________
Describe the problem's symptoms, not your guesses
It's not useful to tell hackers what you think is causing your
problem. (If your diagnostic theories were such hot stuff, would you
be consulting them for help?) So, make sure you're telling them the
raw symptoms of what goes wrong, rather than your interpretations and
theories. Let them do the interpretation and diagnosis.
Stupid:
I'm getting back-to-back SIG11 errors on kernel compiles, and
suspect a hairline crack on one of the motherboard traces.
What's the best way to check for those?
Smart:
My home-built K6/233 on an FIC-PA2007 motherboard (VIA Apollo
VP2 chipset) with 256MB Corsair PC133 SDRAM starts getting
frequent SIG11 errors about 20 minutes after power-on during
the course of kernel compiles, but never in the first 20
minutes. Rebooting doesn't restart the clock, but powering down
overnight does. Swapping out all RAM didn't help. The relevant
part of a typical compile session log follows.
_________________________________________________________________
Describe your problem's symptoms in chronological order
The most useful clues in figuring out something that went wrong often
lie in the events immediately prior. So, your account should describe
precisely what you did, and what the machine did, leading up to the
blowup. In the case of command-line processes, having a session log
(e.g., using the script utility) and quoting the relevant twenty or so
lines is very useful.
If the program that blew up on you has diagnostic options (such as -v
for verbose), try to think carefully about selecting options that will
add useful debugging information to the transcript.
If your account ends up being long (more than about four paragraphs),
it might be useful to succinctly state the problem up top, then follow
with the chronological tale. That way, hackers will know what to watch
for in reading your account.
_________________________________________________________________
Don't ask people to reply by private email
Hackers believe solving problems should be a public, transparent
process during which a first try at an answer can and should be
corrected if someone more knowledgeable notices that it is incomplete
or incorrect. Also, they get some of their reward for being
respondents from being seen to be competent and knowledgeable by their
peers.
When you ask for a private reply, you are disrupting both the process
and the reward. Don't do this. It's the respondent's choice whether to
reply privately -- and if he does, it's usually because he thinks the
question is too obvious or ill-formed to be interesting to others.
There is one limited exception to to this rule. If you think the
question is such that you are likely to get a lot of answers that are
all pretty similar, then the magic words are "email me and I'll
summarize the answers for the group". It is courteous to try and save
the mailing list or newsgroup a flood of substantially identical
postings -- but you have to keep the promise to summarize.
_________________________________________________________________
Prune pointless queries
Resist the temptation to close your request for help with
semantically-null questions like "Can anyone help me?" or "Is there an
answer?" First, if you've written your problem description halfway
competently, such tacked-on questions are at best superfluous. Second,
given the foregoing, the question verges on being actively annoying,
inviting dismissive albeit logically impeccable answers like "Yes" and
"No"
_________________________________________________________________
Courtesy never hurts, and sometimes helps
Be courteous. Use "Please" and "Thanks in advance". Make it clear that
you appreciate the time people spend helping you for free.
To be honest, this isn't as important as (and cannot substitute for)
being grammatical, clear, precise and descriptive, avoiding
proprietary formats etc.; hackers in general would rather get somewhat
brusque but technically sharp bug reports than polite vagueness. (If
this puzzles you, remember that we value a question by what it teaches
us.)
However, if you've got your technical ducks in a row, politeness does
increase your chances of getting a useful answer.
_________________________________________________________________
Follow up with a brief note on the solution
Send a note after the problem has been solved to all who helped you;
let them know how it came out and thank them again for their help. If
the problem attracted general interest in a mailing list or newsgroup,
it's appropriate to post the followup there.
Your followup doesn't have to be long and involved; a simple "Howdy -
it was a failed network cable! Thanks, everyone. - Bill" would be
better than nothing. In fact, a short and sweet summary is better than
a long dissertation unless the solution has real technical depth.
Besides being courteous and informative, this sort of followup helps
everybody who assisted feel a satisfying sense of closure about the
problem. If you are not a techie or hacker yourself, trust us that
this feeling is very important to the gurus and experts you tapped for
help. Problem narratives that trail off into unresolved nothingness
are frustrating things; hackers itch to see them resolved. The good
karma that scratching that itch earns you will be very, very helpful
to you next time you need to pose a question.
_________________________________________________________________
How To Interpret Answers
RTFM and STFW: How To Tell You've Seriously Screwed Up
There is an ancient and hallowed tradition: if you get a reply that
reads "RTFM", the person who sent it thinks you should have Read The
F***ing Manual. He is almost certainly right. Go read it.
RTFM has a younger relative. If you get a reply that reads "STFW", the
person who sent it thinks you should have Searched The F***ing Web. He
is almost certainly right. Go search it.
Often, the person sending either of these replies has the manual or
the web page with the information you need open, and is looking at it
as he types. These replies mean that he thinks (a) the information you
read is easy to find, and (b) you will learn more if you seek out the
information than if you have it spoon-fed to you.
You shouldn't be offended by this; by hacker standards, he is showing
you a rough kind of respect simply by not ignoring you. You should
instead thank him for his grandmotherly kindness.
_________________________________________________________________
If you don't understand...
If you don't understand the answer, do not immediately bounce back a
demand for clarification. Use the same tools that you used to try and
answer your original question (manuals, FAQs, the Web, skilled
friends) to understand the answer. If you need to ask for
clarification, exhibit what you have learned.
For example, suppose I tell you: "It sounds like you've got a stuck
zentry; you'll need to clear it." Then:
Here's a bad followup question: "What's a zentry?"
Here's a good followup question: "OK, I read the man page and zentries
are only mentioned under the -z and -p switches. Neither of them says
anything about clearing zentries. Is it one of these or am I missing
something here?"
_________________________________________________________________
On Not Reacting Like A Loser
Odds are, you'll screw up a few times, on hacker community forums --
in ways detailed in this article, or similar. And you'll be told
exactly how you screwed up, possibly with colourful asides. In public.
When this happens, the worst thing you can do is whine about the
experience, claim to have been verbally assaulted, demand apologies,
scream, hold your breath, threaten lawsuits, complain to people's
employers, leave the toilet seat up, etc. Instead, here's what you do:
Get over it. It's normal. In fact, it's healthy and appropriate.
Community standards do not maintain themselves: They're maintained by
people actively applying them, visibly, in public. Don't whine that
all criticism should have been conveyed via private mail: That's not
how it works. Nor is it useful to insist you've been personally
insulted when someone comments that one of your claims was wrong, or
that his views differ. Those are loser attitudes.
There have been hacker forums where, out of some misguided sense of
hyper-courtesy, participants are banned from posting any fault-finding
with another's posts, and told "Don't say anything if you're unwilling
to help the user." The resulting departure of clueful participants to
elsewhere causes them to descend into meaningless babble and become
useless as technical forums.
Exaggeratedly "friendly" (in that fashion) or useful: Pick one.
Remember: When that hacker tells you that you've screwed up, and (no
matter how gruffly) tells you not to do it again, he's acting out of
concern for (1) you and (2) his community. It would be much easier for
him to ignore you and filter you out of his life. If you can't manage
to be grateful, at least have a little dignity, don't whine, and don't
expect to be treated like a fragile doll just because you're a
newcomer with a theatrically hypersensitive soul and delusions of
entitlement.
_________________________________________________________________
Questions Not To Ask
Here are some classic stupid questions, and what hackers are thinking
when they don't answer them.
Q: Where can I find program X?
Q: I'm having problems with my Windows machine. Can you help?
Q: I'm having problems installing Linux or X. Can you help?
Q: How can I crack root/steal channel-ops privileges/read someone's
email?
Q: Where can I find program X?
A: The same place I'd find it, fool -- at the other end of a web
search. Ghod, doesn't everybody know how to use Google yet?
Q: I'm having problems with my Windows machine. Can you help?
A: Yes. Throw out that Microsoft trash and install Linux.
Q: I'm having problems installing Linux or X. Can you help?
A: No. I'd need hands-on access to your machine to troubleshoot this.
Go ask your local Linux user group for hands-on help.
Q: How can I crack root/steal channel-ops privileges/read someone's
email?
A: You're a lowlife for wanting to do such things and a moron for
asking a hacker to help you.
_________________________________________________________________
Good and Bad Questions
Finally, I'm going to illustrate how to ask questions in a smart way
by example; pairs of questions about the same problem, one asked in a
stupid way and one in a smart way.
Stupid: Where can I find out stuff about the Foonly Flurbamatic?
This question just begs for "STFW" as a reply.
Smart: I used Google to try to find "Foonly Flurbamatic 2600" on the
Web, but I got no useful hits. Does anyone know where I can
find programming information on this device?
This one has already SFTWed, and sounds like he might have a
real problem.
Stupid: I can't get the code from project foo to compile. Why is it
broken?
He assumes that somebody else screwed up. Arrogant of him.
Smart: The code from project foo doesn't compile under Nulix version
6.2. I've read the FAQ, but it doesn't have anything in it
about Nulix-related problems. Here's a transcript of my
compilation attempt; is it something I did?
He's specified the environment, he's read the FAQ, he's showing
the error, and and he's not assuming his problems are someone
else's fault. This guy might be worth some attention.
Stupid: I'm having problems with my motherboard. Can anybody help?
J. Random Hacker's response to this is likely to be "Right. Do
you need burping and diapering, too?" followed by a punch of
the delete key.
Smart: I tried X, Y, and Z on the S2464 motherboard. When that didn't
work, I tried A, B, and C. Note the curious symptom when I
tried C. Obviously the florbish is grommicking, but the results
aren't what one might expect. What are the usual causes of
grommicking on MP motherboards? Anybody got ideas for more
tests I can run to pin down the problem?
This person, on the other hand, seems worthy of an answer. He
has exhibited problem-solving intelligence rather than waiting
for an answer to drop from on high.
In the last question, notice the subtle but important difference
between demanding "Give me an answer" and "Please help me figure out
what additional diagnostics I can run to achieve enlightenment."
In fact, the form of that last question is closely based on a real
incident that happened in August 2001 on the linux-kernel mailing
list. I was the one asking the question that time. I was seeing
mysterious lockups on a Tyan S2464 motherboard. The listmembers
supplied the critical information I needed to solve them.
By asking the question in the way I did, I gave people something to
chew on; I made it easy and attractive for them to get involved. I
demonstrated respect for my peers' ability and invited them to consult
with me as a peer. I demonstrated respect for their time by telling
them the blind alleys I had already run down.
Afterwards, when I thanked everyone and remarked how well the process
had worked, an lkml member observed that he thought it had worked not
because I'm a "name" on that list, but because I asked the question in
the proper form.
We hackers are in some ways a very ruthless meritocracy; I'm certain
he was right, and that if I had behaved like a sponge I would have
been flamed or ignored no matter who I was. His suggestion that I
write up the whole incident as an instruction to others led directly
to the composition of this guide.
------------------------------------------------------------
_______________________________________
CREC LUG mailing list (LUGlist)
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://tux.reccal.ernet.in/mailman/listinfo/lug
http://202.41.105.20/mailman/listinfo/lug
I'd change the world,but God won't give me the source code
_________________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Get your free @yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com
