Tools of the trade

One will be surprised on the types of tools that are out there, since the invention of open source community of hackers, the IT world have been transforming at a very fast rate. Some times i may encounter a problem, and one click will deliver tons of result, why reinventing the wheel only takes precious time and resources, whereas the same goal will be achieved at the end, so why not take it and modify to your taste.

I was faced with a little problem today, i needed some materials on a course i am taking from a professor's web page, and there are tons of documents that if i am to go over each, i will waste valuable time that might be useful writing a block of code. So i remembered wget magic, i used once to download files with the same extension from a page, but this time, i need a whole directory and its content. I went through the man page of wget and found some parameters i can include in my bash command to cleanly get me the whole directory and contents without the index.html files. After few minutes i came up with a clean command;

 wget -r -nH --cut-dirs=2 --no-parent --reject="index.html*" http://PATH_TO_DIRECTORY

and holla:

wget magic at work

This is the point when you sit back and watch your creation at work, feeling like Chuck Norris after defeating the antagonist. 

This kinds of tools are enormous, some times i feel they are infinite, all you need is to look for and you will get, some of us are lazy to research, we feel as if reading through man pages   is a kind of boring process, but actually its fun, i agree when things don't work as perceived, one feels like the blue screen of death itself, but that is the different between normal developers and hackers, "we never quit, ever". Someone i look up to once quoted to me "When solving a problem, there are failures only ways in which the problem cannot be solvled" and believe me anytime you hit a dead end, you gained a lot because next time you will never go that path again.    

The need to write your Software tools

We translate problems from real life into mathematical expressions, following mathematical theorems that cannot be altered for no reason, if one is then everything those. Those mathematical expressions are then translated into a source code that can be compiled as a software useable by humans or computers. But the rules are slightly different between mathematical problem solving and software based problem solving, the difference is gravity and other physical laws can be modified or even altered in terms of software development, making your own tools is something you always do, even though there are a lot of tools out there, sometimes as a hacker you have no choice than to write your's. The need always arise to develop a tool, after day of going through the net searching and nothing turns up, this days it is bit difficult to not find tools suitable for your problem, also there might be a tool out there that is close but small modifications need to be done in order to make them compatible with your platform or language.