After a bit of searching, though, I’ve found a nice updated program called Back in Time.  I really like a lot of the features it supports.  It’s written in python and uses rsync and diff to do its magic.  One of the nice features of Back in Time is that it only updates files that have been updated since the last backup.  This doesn’t seem like that huge of a thing, but it does it well.  The only problem I’ve found is that the it won’t accept symlinks that link to outside of its directories–you’ll have to manually include that directory to be included.  Other than that, it’s great!  Check it out.

First of all, I must admit–the idea of making C code to run on the web is more appealing than Python to me.  Maybe I ‘get’ C better, maybe it’s the fact that Python makes me hate life, or maybe I am just partisan to good programming languages–who knows?  Either way, I just don’t get why people are always trying to move away from languages like PHP which were built to do this.  Do you understand?  PHP was made for the web.  C and Python were not (they appeared on the scene in 1972 and 1991, respectively).  Why do you insist on running those for the web?  Is it the same kind of mentality that drives people to run Linux on refridgerators? Do we just have to prove that we can run anything as a web language?  When do I get my Web-Fortran (and yes, I’m sure it exists somewhere)?

That all being said, this implementation seems quite interesting.  The programmer would write his C code and then compile it.  It would be compiled into a special format for a Virtual Machine.  This would then be converted into code for ActionScript, which is what Flash uses to code it.  This scares me on one hand–god knows Flash is whored out too much as it is–but it’s still very interesting theorhetically.  That being said, once I am forced to write some software in C to be used on the web I think I will go ahead and just stop programming for good.  I understand that the C code could quite possibly be faster than cooresponding PHP code… but the C code would have to be put into flash which completely kills any of that benefit for the end user.  Arrrgh.