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Nov. 30th, 2008 02:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rbandrewsAlex Robinson wrote a graphic novel that is super incredibly awesome called Box Office Poison. I read it when I was living with the Obs, and it spoke to me. I loaned it to Tucker and Emily, and they liked it too. It's a really good story about a group of twenty-somethings in New York. The plot, such as it is, involves an aging comic book artist being cheated out of royalties for his characters, but mostly it's about relationships, working in bookstores, and evil landlords.
Hacker Lore is sort of my catch-all term for the collection of stories, myths, tricks, and koans that make the closest thing my culture has to, well, a culture. I collect stuff like that, both because it helps explain programming, and because it helps explain what it means to be a programmer. It's sort of like studying mythology, but all from the last half-century or so.
I like doing math for fun because math is supposed to be fun. It's mental play. Any idea that math should have a practical point, or be used in some way to create something (other than more math), I think was probably forced on nerds by business engineer types. Another thing I like to do, sort of along those lines, is whenever I see a weirdly-shaped object, I try to picture a machine that could manufacture it. Lamps and furniture are good for this.
Steve Wozniak is sort of the ideal of the playful nerd hacker. He got into it for fun, did it playfully, and not only did he become rich, but when he did, he gave away a lot of his money and then got out in order to keep having fun. He's got no respect for authority, and has even jailbroken an iPhone live on TV. I'd like to think that if I were in his situation, I'd be like him, but I probably wouldn't be anywhere near that cool.
A couple years ago I got a Touchstream keyboard because my hands hurt so much after writing code all day. The Touchstream goes for about $1000 now (mine is somewhat delicate, and I probably need to take it apart and mess with it, but I'm afraid to).
It's a keyboard, made out of two gigantic multitouch pads. Apple bought the company that made it, Fingerworks, in 2004 or so, so they'll never make another one (also why only Apple stuff has multitouch; it's patented). The keyboard is very hard to use, but rewarding: by using strange gestures you can do magical things with it, sort of like MacBook's two-finger-scroll, but with all your fingers, and totally customizable.
After it started being somewhat delicate, I stopped using it mostly, and instead tweaked my keyboard layout and learned to write Emacs macros to have to type less, but I've still got it around.
Verbs is a programmer joke, that I'll now attempt to explain. There's a movement in programming called Object-Oriented Programming, where you write programs by making classes of objects and describing how they work. So to make a driving program, you make a car class, and then a specific car that's an "instance" of that class, and the car has things you can do to it like fill the gas tank, steer right, push the brakes, etc.
Object-Oriented Programming is heavy on the nouns, to the point that if something isn't a noun, you have to make it one: you need to generate a report, you don't use the verb "generate", you make a noun called "ReportGenerator" instead. In some languages, like Java, you aren't even allowed to use verbs. Everything's a noun.
Anyway, after seeing enough things crammed into nouns, a lot of people, Steve Yegge among us, got fed up and said "verbs are okay too!". So there are languages now that respect the verb, and programmers who respect those languages.
Reiner Knizia (RYE-nur NEE-tse-uh) is a game designer. He's hit-and-miss, but his hits are amazingly good instant classics. Tucker first introduced me to his games, in college. His most famous ones are probably Ingenious, Modern Art, Lord of the Rings, Ra, Samurai, and Tigris and Euphrates (of which I own all but Ingenious).
Kinda hard to describe, except that his games often use multiple types of scoring (with your final score being whatever you have the least of). He's also won a metric crapton of awards.
I listened to an interview of him once with advice that really stuck with me (totally un-game-related): when you work in a company, if you don't do what that company does, then you're not going to be respected. So if you work as a sysadmin in a bank, you could be the best sysadmin ever, but you aren't a banker, so you'll be looked down on. It's largely why I wanted to leave government work, since the government doesn't make software.
This is a meme. If you comment below, I'll pick seven of your interests and have you expound on them.
Hacker Lore is sort of my catch-all term for the collection of stories, myths, tricks, and koans that make the closest thing my culture has to, well, a culture. I collect stuff like that, both because it helps explain programming, and because it helps explain what it means to be a programmer. It's sort of like studying mythology, but all from the last half-century or so.
I like doing math for fun because math is supposed to be fun. It's mental play. Any idea that math should have a practical point, or be used in some way to create something (other than more math), I think was probably forced on nerds by business engineer types. Another thing I like to do, sort of along those lines, is whenever I see a weirdly-shaped object, I try to picture a machine that could manufacture it. Lamps and furniture are good for this.
Steve Wozniak is sort of the ideal of the playful nerd hacker. He got into it for fun, did it playfully, and not only did he become rich, but when he did, he gave away a lot of his money and then got out in order to keep having fun. He's got no respect for authority, and has even jailbroken an iPhone live on TV. I'd like to think that if I were in his situation, I'd be like him, but I probably wouldn't be anywhere near that cool.
A couple years ago I got a Touchstream keyboard because my hands hurt so much after writing code all day. The Touchstream goes for about $1000 now (mine is somewhat delicate, and I probably need to take it apart and mess with it, but I'm afraid to).
It's a keyboard, made out of two gigantic multitouch pads. Apple bought the company that made it, Fingerworks, in 2004 or so, so they'll never make another one (also why only Apple stuff has multitouch; it's patented). The keyboard is very hard to use, but rewarding: by using strange gestures you can do magical things with it, sort of like MacBook's two-finger-scroll, but with all your fingers, and totally customizable.
After it started being somewhat delicate, I stopped using it mostly, and instead tweaked my keyboard layout and learned to write Emacs macros to have to type less, but I've still got it around.
Verbs is a programmer joke, that I'll now attempt to explain. There's a movement in programming called Object-Oriented Programming, where you write programs by making classes of objects and describing how they work. So to make a driving program, you make a car class, and then a specific car that's an "instance" of that class, and the car has things you can do to it like fill the gas tank, steer right, push the brakes, etc.
Object-Oriented Programming is heavy on the nouns, to the point that if something isn't a noun, you have to make it one: you need to generate a report, you don't use the verb "generate", you make a noun called "ReportGenerator" instead. In some languages, like Java, you aren't even allowed to use verbs. Everything's a noun.
Anyway, after seeing enough things crammed into nouns, a lot of people, Steve Yegge among us, got fed up and said "verbs are okay too!". So there are languages now that respect the verb, and programmers who respect those languages.
Reiner Knizia (RYE-nur NEE-tse-uh) is a game designer. He's hit-and-miss, but his hits are amazingly good instant classics. Tucker first introduced me to his games, in college. His most famous ones are probably Ingenious, Modern Art, Lord of the Rings, Ra, Samurai, and Tigris and Euphrates (of which I own all but Ingenious).
Kinda hard to describe, except that his games often use multiple types of scoring (with your final score being whatever you have the least of). He's also won a metric crapton of awards.
I listened to an interview of him once with advice that really stuck with me (totally un-game-related): when you work in a company, if you don't do what that company does, then you're not going to be respected. So if you work as a sysadmin in a bank, you could be the best sysadmin ever, but you aren't a banker, so you'll be looked down on. It's largely why I wanted to leave government work, since the government doesn't make software.
This is a meme. If you comment below, I'll pick seven of your interests and have you expound on them.
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no subject
Date: 2008-12-01 06:52 am (UTC)whenever I see a weirdly-shaped object, I try to picture a machine that could manufacture it. Lamps and furniture are good for this.
That is fairly awesome.
no subject
Date: 2008-12-01 03:55 pm (UTC)Also, you ever notice that feeling you get when you solve a really hard math problem and you're all, I'm a freaking genius! That feeling should be cultivated in math classes across the country.
no subject
Date: 2008-12-01 10:15 pm (UTC)I love that math genius feeling! It demonstrates that math is pretty cool, deep down. But instead of wanting to make you feel smart, they seem to want to make you feel stupid unless you're actually a math genius, so that all the math bimbos will flee the maths and leave it free of their taint.
no subject
Date: 2008-12-01 03:52 pm (UTC)It will be fucking awesome.