Is zip again

Today is Malaysia Merdeka Day (Independent Day), let's celebrate. How do I celebrate? Coding overnight, while other singing karaoke and watching fireworks.

You are not going to believe this, I am still using my floppy diskette to transfer my program from one machine to another. I zip my program, so reading and writing to the diskette will be faster.

Now days, not much people care about zip program, because they store their program or data in their 1GB thumb drive, zip or non-zip make not much different.

Ten or fifteen years ago, zip program is very important to us. There is no thumb drive or CD-Rom storage, hard disk are 40MB in capacity, storage is expensive, we store our data on diskette, zip utility help us a lot.

There is quite a number of compression format and utility tools available:-

pkzip
lha (.LZH)
arj
rar

For some reason, I have chosen lha as my compression tools, all my old data files are still compress in lha format (.LZH). Arj has a better compress ratio at that time, but is slow, rar is proprietary, lha has a better compress ratio than zip, decompress faster than arj, and I have a tools to convert .LZH to an executable.

I should have chosen zip. Zip is the most common compression format, a lot of tools and utility program is available, as freeware or even open source software. I could hardly find any tools and utility program support lha format. Now I have to convert all my .LZH files to .ZIP.

I learn my lesson now, choose a format which common and open, which will last long. Sacrifice a little bit of compression ratio and program performance is reasonable. May be should thanks Phil Katz, whether he is doing right or wrong, he did contribute to the popularity of zip format.