Understand the computer through Bash

Over the past few weeks, I have been writing various bash scripts to automate the various tasks I have to perform to maintain a Planetlab slice and run tests for my experiments on Amazon EC2. As a novice in bash scripting, I have spent a good chunk of time reading the bash manual (easily available through ‘man bash’). Through reading the manual, I began to understand how powerful the shell really is. As a child of the graphical UI era, where everything is done through mouse clicks, noone took the time to tell me how much more effective one can be by simply interacting with the shell. The shell gives you so much more control and understanding for process management, file access, and networking. Overall, the shell has helped me gain a much greater appreciation for the operating system and for the many tool available for decades such as grep, awk, sed, find, join, cat, lpr, screen, vim, cut, just to name a few. The sad part is that it took me this long to realize this, but as they say, it’s better late than never.

TTYL, Internetland

Microsoft is going to do well

I just had a thought today about the future of Microsoft and I decided to blog it. Overall, Microsoft is going to do well in the coming years. Three things are going to help Microsoft: economy, netbooks, and multicore systems with a lot of RAM. With the bad economy, Microsoft was finally able to come up with an effective ad campaign. Basically, Microsoft says that Macs are too expensive and they are not worth the price. With multicore laptops with over 4GB Ram for less than $500, who needs a Mac. Secondly, they are netbooks, they are light, small, cheap, and they run Windows. Recent numbers have shown that netbook users are not ready for Linux, as a result, Windows is the predominant netbook OS. With Mac out of the game, Microsoft is unchallenged in that space. Since, netbooks are getting the fastest growing sales numbers, Microsoft is having a good time with that. Finally, incredibly powerful desktop machines. I am amazed at how cheap Quad-core machines with amazing amounts of memory have gotten. As a result, with Windows 7 coming out, the Microsoft OS can be as bloated as possible, and still run fine. Applications do not have to be light anymore, with the availability of powerful video cards, 4-core CPUs and 6 GB ram, any OS should be able to run smooth with room to spare. Overall, these combinations of things will probably help Microsoft in the long run. Too bad, I don’t invest in the stock market. Once again, Internet land, I’m out.

The Small Programs that mean a lot

Today I came to the realization that I have been using Putty for about 7 years now with no problems. Putty is a lightweight ssh client for Windows. I’ve been using it ever since I started programming in 2002. It works great and it’s standalone. It’s these little open-source programs that usually stay true to the spirit of programming. You sit down, you write some code that you love writing, and you offer it to the world and hope that they come learn from or you learn from it through criticism. Either way, it’s not tainted by ambitions of wealth, just fueled by a desire to help others. That’s what I aspire for, writing code that could help the world and not motivated by foolish dreams of recognition. But as they say, I guess I’m still young and life has not hardened me yet.

Too much too fast

Do you know that you can purchase a Quad-core machine with 4GB of RAM for about $500? As we all know, computers always get cheaper, but I am somewhat amazed at how fast these multicore machines are hitting the market. This could be seen as a good thing, because users have access to so much computing power, but it can also be a waste of resources. With the availability of this powerful machines, application developers have gotten careless. Applications are now full with bells and wistles, with not enough real functionality. The worst part about the whole thing is that if you are running an old PC (let’s say a single core 2.2 GHz with 512MB, you can do very little with that nowadays). I can barely browse the web anymore. My girlfriend has a 3GB RAM machine and at one point Internet Explorer was using almost 500MB, it’s not just IE’s fault, there’s also javascript and flash to blame as well. I guess I’m just frustrated that I can barely use my PC with 512 MB running Windows. So all in all, because everyone have these powerful machines, application developers are not really too concerned about the little guy who wants to keep enjoying his 6-year old PC. Maybe I should just boycott Windows, Flash, and Javascript altogether and find smarter ways to obtain retreive the information that I need from the web through Minix and Lynx. I may be fed up enough to do that. Until next time, Internet Land.

Drupal kicks tail

I’ve spent most of my day today playing around with Drupal (www.drupal.org) and it is by far the best content management system that I’ve ever used. Much better than Joomla, it’s kinda of like a Windows vs Linux comparison. Joomla is easier to use at first but more limited, Drupal is a bit confusing at first, but once you understand the basic concepts then the possibilities are limitless. I just wanted to share with the world.