I have the opportunity to attain Tim O'Reilly visionary talk before. This time I come up on his powerpoint presentation The Internet Paradigm Shift. It summarized many important ideas of the future of computing, like the commoditization of software stem from open source software development. He also have some insight in suggesting hidden business model and that owning user data would be the new form of customer lock-in. I think the new era of internet applications will not be far away. In a few years we will be so use to it that PC computing would become a relic.

2003.12.24 [tech] - comments

Finally got rid of my backup script written in Bash and replaced it with a Python one. I have enough trouble dealing with Bash and I am not looking forward to use it again. Influenced by a passionate crowd, I started working with Linux enthusiastically one year ago. I came around to learn everything about Linux, Vi, Bash, anticipating that they would be great solution to many computing problems.

One of my project was to build a simple backup script using Bash and tar. I started to encounter problem in very basic operations. Thanks for the way Bash does globbing, I cannot easily specify file pattern for files under subdirectories. Tar has its own quirk that I have to hack with 3 different configuration files to setup an inclusion and exclusion list. I finally come to a revelation that should be obvious in retrospect, that many of 30 years old design around Unix are just archaic, difficult to use and error prone. I ditched Bash for a more modern Python. I am very happy since for the easy XML configuration and maintainability.

The lesson learned? Watch out for zealotries. Take their opinion with a grain of salt. They tend to oversold the upside and downplay any problem. Always discern things with critical eyes. This also applies many other areas to such as political opinions.

2003.12.22 [software, unix] - comments