3l33t h@x0r alert!!!

I used to get into arguments with this kid I worked with. He was an intern and then we hired him out of college. I don’t know what it was, but he had this irrational love for the “olden days of hacking.” That’s the only way I can explain it. I grew up on computers. I’ve worked on them since the mid-eighties, having used an XT with a gigantic 10MB hard drive and one of the first “portables” which was almost 3 inches thick and probably a foot and a half long. I feel safety with a commandline (I miss DOS 4.01), and I’m trying to learn more about other systems such as Linux (my server is running it afterall). But I have to admit that I like a nice GUI. I like what Red Hat has done with Blue Curve, and when WinXP works I really like it. I was ecstatic when Cisco came out with a Java app to configure their PIX firewall. It never looked so nice.

Anywho, this kid always wanted to learn the commandline for everything. If he asked me how to do something and I showed him in the GUI, he would continue searching for how to do it on the commandline. He refused to learn the Java app for the PIX, because he hated Java. Of course when he programmed a PIX for one of our major clients it ended up have well over 100 lines of ACLs. I re-did it with the Java app, and it took about 6 ACLs and a few object definitions. It took him a couple days to get that all sorted out and entered in, whereas it took me about 45 minutes to delete his old setup and re-write them correctly in the GUI. Go figure.

The whole reason this is coming up now, months after this all became a moot point, is that I found this great article by John Lasser from SecurityFocus. He basically digs into that feeling that people need to code in older low-level languages to make a better program. We have the processors, let’s use them! Who cares if you can package a web server that’s only half a meg and takes up almost no memory. My server has over 200gigs of storage and like half a gig of memory – if you can do a more complete job by taking up more space, go ahead. The main point is that John points out the fallacy in thinking that low-level means better, more secure, or more efficient. It can, but then again, so can high-level. I know another guy who pretty much only codes in Java. He seems to do pretty well with that, as he’s still working on the stock market. Whatever…