|
Work on the web site, as I keep saying, continues apace. If you have
a problem with that, please take it up with the nearest brick wall. It
will be friendlier than me , and won't punch back. Though I have learned
more CSS than I hopefully will ever need to know. Just wish I had a
handbook for it on Lackey. Still, trial and error are fun, in the same
way burning witches was fun. For the witches.
On a bizarre side note, if I host it on my Netscape site I may have the
chance to use CGI scripts. Looks like all these boring days using Perl
will finally come to fruition. Mail me about any features you may want
(Forums/bulletin boards, an online chat etc.). If anyone suggest polls,
they can sod off and think of the questions. I don't think that way. I
talk at people, not to them.
* * *
I have been reading. Don't look so scared, it's what usually happens
when Iget bored and have nothing to read but the Aberrant and Trinity
softcovers. Sure, they're good. They're also good at reminding me I have
no gaming group, and not a chance in hell of playing them for a good 14
months. Hells, when I get to America, I might just tap up a few of you
to act as a gaming group. Be afraid.
Snow Crash is a fantastic book. See if you can find it. If you can't,
break someone's limbs. Imagine the kind of mindfuck that Robert Anton
Wilson is good at (if you haven't heard of him, get Prometheus Rising at
the same time as Snow Crash). Trust me on this, you will think, when you
read these books. You will think the kinds of thoughts that used to get
you burned for witchcraft, or at least a nice long bath to see if you
floated for the same. But in this day and age, it's called philosophy,
and is a good way to get onto a University course. Though if you want to
warm up, you're out of luck.
Though I may not agree with the idea of neurolinguistic hacking
(altering what people do by talking to them in a weird language, if you
want more detail, read the damn book), I certainly agree with his view
of cyberspace. Which is one of the few problems I always had with
William Gibson, the God of Cyberpunk. For those philistines that have
not even heard of Neuromancer, in Gibson's ideal, the computer elites go
play in some kind of digital playground, made out of VR, so that they
can hack and program more efficiently. I can see that much. What I don't
see is how the modern hacker culture will ever evolve to that point.
(Random tangent #whatever: I use hacker here in it's meaning as given in
the Jargon File, as someone that likes dicking around with computer
programming. Those wankers that get hackers bad press are crackers, and
should not be confused with the 14 year old W4reZ d00Dz that pirate
software. Trust me, I'm an old school hacker. I'm right on this one).
You see, at present, the easier an OS it to use, the less the level of
skill required to use it. I'm typing this in a standard flat-text editor
on one of the machines at work, running XSun for the Solaris UNIX
operating system. But, for the guys upstairs in the offices, the ones
that know all the physics, but not how to break a net filter or restart
someone's machine remotely, a nice, sanitized Windows machine is what
they need. They don't want a return to the days of command-line editing.
And yet show me a hacker in the building that doesn't use vi (a bloody
confusing UNIX editor like a much stranger version of the old DOS-based
Edit command) to write his programs? The closer the tool is to the
'heart' of the machine, the easier it is to fuck with that heart, but
the harder it is to use. That's my own Sixth Hacker Tenet. Why, then, do
Gibson's "deckers" use a VR interface? It's like people that fuck with
machine code using a Windows drag and drop interface. It makes no sense
to me. You can spend four hours on a drag and drop piece of code that
could be written in four minutes in something like vi or Edit. That's my
complaint with this whole "VR Hacking" idea.
Instead, how's this for an idea. The internet goes VR. Anyone that likes
dicking around with computers and can beg, scrounge or steal enough cash
goes there. Then, there's almost half as much again that can't afford it
but do it anyway because they are addicted (like me and the net). A
corporate programmer can sit in his VR office, peruse VR documents, and
write VR programs just by moving blocks of code together. But the
hackers, those that built the place, do all of their work in 2-D, in
flat text editors, using old UNIX commands and bizarre text editors (Emacs,
anyone?) to come up with the structure of the VR universe, and to do the
real, low level programming. To me, it makes a lot more sense. But I'll
still play a decker in Cyberpunk.
* * *
Gods, what a week. Working ten hour on the bloody server move lead to us
finally learning how to travel back in time. By 2 pm Friday, we were at
the same point as we were 4:30 pm Thursday. The weekend was spent in a
flurry of watching people getting pissed and eating good curry, and
watching the F1. (Fuck off Schumacker. Everyone knows your name's German
for 'cobblers'). Unfortunately, this has left me with no net access, a
drained bank account, and a mild case of chronic depression. Finding out
that I couldn't afford next weekend's planned trip to Vienna to see a
friend was a kick in the proverbials as well. But then, I don't have a
spare eighty-odd quid. So, I decided to be depressed, and chow down on
Admiral Ackbar.
There's one thing I will say for Munich. Anything you may want to eat,
you can get it takeaway. This might not sound like much to the
Americans, or anyone used to living in a city with over a million
inhabitants, but to a Yorkshire lad like me, it came as quite a shock.
There's the usual fast food joints, like Bugger King and McMoron. But
then, wandering down Leopoldstrasse, it's possible to get anything from
three differrent restaurant's idea of pizza, to Chinese takeaway, to
sushi, to bagels and coffee, to seafood. All packaged up neatly to take
home with you, or eat on the way. And all of these takeaways are
practically right next door to each other. Which is a major advantage if
like me you get hunger pangs for squid rings with barbecue sauce, and a
slice of salami pizza. It is confirmed, I have no tastebuds left. What
the hell.
So, as I was wandering back to my flat at about half ten at night, half
an hour after I hould have got in if I were sane and/or intelligent, I
realise that I'm actually beginning to grow fond of this city, of this
country. More fond of it than home, stuck in a suburb with no
intelligent life for miles atround, where the only thing there really is
to do on a night is go to the pub and get so plastered you can't see the
townie children in their kappa tracksuits coming to beat you up and
steal your money. On the other hand, Munich has a lot more to do with my
time, a hell of a lot more. Unfortunately, I have to be up early just
about every damn morning, and that means being early to bed (asleep for
half eleven at the latest) if I don't want to be fired and thus fail my
degree for sleeping at work. I wish I had more flexible hours. And a
work-based internet connection would be nice, seeing as how this will
take weeks to be seen. Bugger.
(As a vague FYI, this was written Monday the 18th of July. If I'm very
lucky, it'll get sent out before August.)
* * *
If you don't get the jokes (especially the one about our old
target^H^H^H^H^H^H friend, Schumacker, let me know and I'll do my best
to explain. It's just gone half past ten in the morning, and you
slavedrivers expect me to be sentient?
Stewart Wilson, the Digital Raven
The warren, 23rd July 2001
|