Diary of a Network Geek

Not so old school that they’re printed, but, still, pretty old school.

I’ve always been an email sort of guy. And, I pretty much hate the modern forums. I hate having to go to a web interface and deal with all their junk and advertising. Also, as regular readers may have noticed from my blog, I’m a pretty text-heavy sort of fella. When I started in IT, fancy interfaces were the stuff of science-fiction. We did our work in the digital uranium mines via text interfaces, and we liked it!
Okay, all joking aside, my first work with computers pre-dated both Windows and the web, and maybe I never got over the simple beauty of straight, text-based information. No real fancy formatting or anything, especially in email. I still tend to view and write email messages in plain, raw text.
In any case, back in the day, the way we shared information was the old-fashioned newsletter. And, let me tell you, there were some ultra exclusive email lists that people fought to get included on. My favorites were the slightly secret UNIX security email newsletters. It felt very, very exclusive and, as they said far too often in the movie Hackers, “elite”.

Now, mostly, that time is gone. People, including me, use blog aggregators and RSS feed readers to keep up on the latest news. But, the venerable email newsletters aren’t entirely dead. As the folks at Discover write, “There is something beautiful about the personal newsletter. We love the depth and admire writers who cover niche topics in great detail. We love the intimacy of seeing these notes arriving in our inboxes directly from our favorite authors. And we love the serenity of reading every word without being interrupted by notifications. … We often wake up in the morning, eager to check if the latest issue by our favorite author has arrived, much like we used to check the mailbox for the daily newspaper or weekly magazine in the old days.” And that sums up why I like email newsletters better than anything else. It IS like a very specialized electronic newspaper emailed to me on a regular basis. Like Dave Pell’s NextDraft, which I look forward to every week day.

So, if you’re like me and enjoy information at a slightly slower pace than firehose that is the web, check this out and subscribe to some of these personally curated newsletters.
Hope to see you back next week, and, until then, enjoy your reading!

This post originally appeared on Use Your Words.

You ever wonder how hackers in the movies type code so fast?

Okay, maybe it’s just me, but when I see programmers cranking out code on a TV series or a movie, I always wonder how they’re typing so much so fast.  And, I’ll be honest, I wonder how accurate their code really is.  So, I’m sure most people don’t really care about all that, but just assume all computer people bang away on the keyboard to churn out code.  Hey, they probably don’t even notice what keys we hit at all!
Well, I’ve finally found out how Hollywood simulates what they think coding is like!  It’s a site called Hacker Typer!

You go, open up the application, which looks like an old-school terminal, and just start banging on the keyboard.  It literally does not matter what keys you hit!  And, the app does all the work, producing line after line of what looks like decent, usable code.  I actually have no idea if that code will do anything or not, but it looks good, and, in Hollywood, that’s all that matters.
So, what the heck, it’s Friday.  Go hit that site and pretend to be a hacker!