Posted by Andrew
Thu, 18 Sep 2008 10:06:00 GMT
Okay, this is a post for all you geeks and Skype users out there. If you’re both, then score for you. It’s a little piece of coolness which Skype users may well appreciate.
So I was instant messaging one of my friends fairly late last night, I was waiting for my travel agent to open so I could call them. It being late at night, my brain farted and I slipped into the dreaded then/than mistake (than should be used in comparisons, for those who are interested). My normal thing in IM of any kind is to use the standard sed as I commonly do. Most people don’t understand what on earth I’ve written, but it’s a good way for me to clear my context of such heinous spelling or grammar errors.
Sed, for those who are not acquainted with the deep magic of the *nix command line, is a stream editor. Basically, it allows you to do edits on streams of text from the command line. That’s boring, no one cares. What is interesting is what happened next. I was confused, because after I hit enter, nothing seemed to happen, my substitution line didn’t seem to be sent. Actually, it wasn’t sent. Something better happened. Skype did the same substitution that the command would have effected (roughly) with the UNIX command line tool. It replaced my mistake in my previous message.
So, for all those visual people:
Skype wins a lot of cred for this. They took what I, and a lot of similarly minded people do and made it a feature in their application. The fact that I can also edit large amounts of text with the same method does open doors, but the “edited” tag is comforting.
Tags geekery, im, sed, skype, substitution, tips | 1 comment
Posted by Andrew
Wed, 04 Oct 2006 16:53:21 GMT
To call me a nerd is probably pretty fair. Actually, I don't know about that. I can't work out quite whether I'm a geek or a nerd. I'm also not sure where the distinction between the two lies. I had a look around and found differing responses here (Mouse Words, blog), here (Twilight Universe, blog), and here (Slashdot, technology news site). I'm still not convinced, but here are a few thoughts of mine:
I've always thought of myself as a geek, rather than a nerd. I don't know exactly why, but nerd has more of a negative connotation to me. I have reasonable social skills, and I don't think I break in to nerdiness too much when I'm having a conversation with mere mortals, however, if I meet another geek, then it's on for young and old. For example, after Devotion one Saturday night, we went out for pizza (gourmet pizza from Tyrone's, don't worry :D) and everything was normal. Murray, one of the guys who was there is a web designer by trade, and somehow we got talking about XHTML and Ruby on Rails and how most MySpace profiles that look half decent are dirty hacks. That moment has lived on in the minds of those there to such a point that when I met one of the other guys who was there at the pub the other night, he was very excited to tell me he was learning XHTML.
See, there was a point to that story, other than proving that I do leave the house on occasion. From one meeting, that guy had me pinned as a geek, through a bit of innocent nerd talk. But there I go, mixing terms. Interesting, isn't it? I call myself a geek, but call what I do “nerding it up” and “nerd talk” as well as “assorted geekery”. Are the terms interchangeable? I'd still like to thing they aren't. As a descriptor of a person, geek is quite separate from nerd. A geek definitely has the social skills and is generally willing to talk on another level, appropriate to an occasion, but my on occasion lapse back into technical speak. A nerd however, is more defined by their social interactions. If they think a LUG meeting, or Warhammer meet, or LAN party is the pinnacle of their social life, someone is a major nerd.
Of course, there is a blurring of the lines. For some bizarre reason, some of my friends have decided that post high-school (and the accompanying exams, which are all we have left!), they want to get heavily into Warhammer. Now, they on occasion give me crap for being a geek, and of course, are often justified in that. Of course, they were now entering what I consider nerd-dom... In my mind, Warhammer is for twelve-year-olds and of course, GIANT NERDS! Of course this idea was thrown back in my face when I put it forward. Such is life ;)
Onto the whole matter of the label, irrelevant of which one you use. I don't particularly like being boxed by a label. I don't mind it if I have just finished a diatribe about how a VLAN based restructure of the school network is necessary because of the fact that we have very minimal edge security, and that authentication to the edge is necessary to prevent rogue machines if you call me a name, but if it's a general pattern then things get fun. If there's one thing my ex was good at, it was finding and highlighting my insecurities. She decided it was fun to, whenever I mentioned something at all technical, to call me a nerd. Suffice to say, things didn't end well there. That wasn't the reason, but I'm sure it didn't help.
So basically what I'm trying to say (and spent a great deal of time discussing aimlessly) is that I don't mind sometimes being called a geek, or even a nerd on special occasions, but I absolutely loathe being defined by one of those terms. I will quite happily engage with people, but I also enjoy the mental stimulation of the technical things that I do. Don't box me in because of that.
Tags geekery, rants | 2 comments | no trackbacks
Posted by Andrew
Tue, 16 May 2006 12:44:00 GMT
I know I promised musical shenannigans, and I will get to that, but right now I’m really riled up about this. You can all just be glad I’m posting.
It seems every day I go through my RSS feeds and at least one article comes up, either from Digg or Boing Boing which has something about some American twerp who wants to regulate the internet. I know there has been a lot said about internet neutrality, but I think there is more to it than that.
Yet again someone wants to tax internet Telphony. That’s just downright wrong. To say that I’m not paying for the phonecalls is downright stupid. If I’m paying for the bandwidth, then I’m paying for the call. If my VoIP provider wants to charge me, or doesn’t want to charge me, that’s up to them. The government should not have any right to tax that any more than they tax my bandwidth costs.
Now, with most ISPs also being telcos, there is a distinct conflict of interest. I’ve also read stories about ISPs messing with VoIP connections. That’s plain wrong. That is blatant hostile behaviour, and shouldn’t be tolerated. Strict ringfencing needs to be engaged when it comes to separating phone and internet businesses.
That’s about all the steam I have left, so enjoy that rant for a while.
Tags geekery, internet neutrality, ISPs, VoIP | 4 comments | no trackbacks
Posted by Andrew
Tue, 28 Feb 2006 16:31:00 GMT
Somehow I found my way to an interesting post about "Going Bedouin" or doing business in a completely portable way. It's a cool concept, and if I ever managed to get a web based business off the ground, it'd be the way I'd do it. I mean, it's just cool. A nice coffee, a change of scenery when you need it, plenty of distractions if you need them and it's something very different. It takes away from the 9-5 idea of work, and makes it less about the mundane day to day, and more about the interesting things, the people and such.
Also addressed in the post is an idea for what could simply be called a cafe for geeks. Let's face it, around the North Sydney/St Leonards area, there are a lot of geeks, from Optus and Cisco down in North Sydney, to Cisco (again), MCI, OzEmail, I think Optus as well in St Leonards plus a few others, there's a bunch of tech companies around the area. Surely there'd be a market for the techies... Interesting layout, something different, free, or cheap WiFi, power-points to charge your laptop, maybe a reference library with various tech books, a selection of tech magazines to read while having your coffee, even Digg/Slashdot/Whatever RSS feeds being scrolled through on plasma screens on the wall.
It's really all taking shape in my head. The question is, would it just become a ghetto for geeks, or somewhere they could bring their "normal" friends as well? Who knows? Anyone interested?
Tags geekery, ideas | 3 comments | no trackbacks
Posted by Andrew
Sun, 05 Feb 2006 14:00:00 GMT
Just a quick post (another lengthier one may come later tonight) to express my astonishment and to say how stoked I am. I was bored last night, so I was helping out a bit in the #rubyonrails channel on Freenode and someone actually bought me a copy of TextMate, the most amazing text editor of all time. I was amazed that someone would do something for a complete random on IRC.
I’ll try and explain why TextMate is so good later on, but let’s say, it’s the best way to write code I’ve found, and I’ve tried my fair share of editors.
Tags geekery, irc | 1 comment | no trackbacks
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