Virtual Thought

“The deadliest enemies of nations are not their foreign foes; they always dwell within their borders. And from these internal enemies civilization is always in need of being saved. The nation blessed above all nations is she in whom the civic genius of the people does the saving day by day, by acts without external picturesqueness; by speaking, writing, voting reasonably; by smiting corruption swiftly, by good temper between parties; by the people knowing true men when they see them, and preferring them as leaders to rabid partisans or empty quacks.” —William James

Sean posted an article about an article he read entitled “Great Hackers”. Whenever I read articles about “great hackers” I become two separate people. On the one hand is the part of me that is trying very hard not to sense greatness about myself, but secretly knows I’m a great hacker; the other part is convinced that his twin is a nutjob, and that I shouldn’t bother thinking about whether I’m a great hacker because I’m not and just be happy while secretly despising that other people get to be “great hackers” and I don’t.

I don’t particularly like either of these people. I hope that I strike a happy medium between the two selves that wage war in me when I read great articles like this. “Hacker chic”, I call it. I love hackers. My friend, John Hood is a fantastic hacker… you can tell by his stylin’ HTML moves. This is the guy who writes video games, reverse engineered a Playstation 2 for fun, and is now making money reverse engineering cars when he’s not “doodling”, a process other human beings call “creating neat works of art”. John is absolutely a hacker, and I’m nowhere in his league for that stuff.

But neither am I strictly a codemonkey. I have a good head for design, I love tackling strange coding problems, and I dream about creating intelligent agents that will help me rule the world help all mankind evolve to a different plane. I’m writing a game in my spare time, I absolutely adore weird crusty technologies (witness the 800 baud modem and old style radio mike I have at home). Where does this put me?

I don’t know.

Found a neat article about a new type of artifical heart that uses, as its primary impeller a rotating blade assembly. Traditional artificial hearts (a phrase that could only exist in our age) apparently wear down all the time because they have many small, intricate moving parts that wear down after a very short time. This thing, however, has no such pieces and the creators have no idea how long it could last… only that it will last longer than the older model.

It has one side effect: no pulse. Because it doesn’t imitate the pumping heart but instead more of a turbine concept, the patients with this artificial heart don’t have a pulse, only a “gentle whirling noise that patients describe as similar to the sound of a washing machine…” That’s really freaky. I mean, really freaky.

So now we can’t say, “He’d have sex with anyone with a pusle,” because that doesn’t include everyone in the human race. The phrase, “He’d have sex with anyone with a constant flow blood stream,” just doesn’t have the same ring to it.

How personal is this concept of “blogrolling”? Can I post a link to a blog of someone that I’ve never met, but admire? Considering that my previous blogroll links were simply my friends (who I also admire and respect as great minds, all of them), why shouldn’t someone who has my respect and admiration be in my blogroll?

It still feels kinda dirty. I’ve never met the guy, but I like reading what he says because he’s such a nutjob… but one that I admire. I dunno, it just feels kinda personal. Am I just being freaky?

EDIT: Just realized that Joel Spolsky’s blog has been linked from mine for a while now. I’ve never met him. So that makes this particular mini-crisis moot. But why was it so weird? Why so different?

Got a comment on this post about SignedXML from SevenObjects themselves pointing out a small error on my part:

Or maybe the article was based on our licensing scheme which was release prior to that blogg ;-)

I would suggest that there are numerous articles around which explain SignedXML very well, or maybe people just develop it themselves for thier own requirements.

http://jclement.ca/devel/dotnet/signedxml.html
http://www.xmltrustcenter.org/xkms/dotnet/sign.htm

Heh! I stand slightly corrected… and I’m still glad I paid the $11. Thanks guys!

There’s an article on MSDN about the Ten Must-Have Tools Every Developer Should Download Now, and while I agree with most of their statements, I have a couple of things to say…

I would add ReSharper to the list of programs every .NET developer should download right now, of course. I can’t imagine not being able to refactor my code with a couple of mouse clicks, or renaming a variable everywhere it appears in my program intelligently and quickly… thanks to Ryan for showing it to me in the first place.

Second, there’s this sentence down where the article discusses Lutz Roeder’s .NET Reflector... “The .NET Framework introduced the world to the concept of reflection…” Hello? Java much?

This kind of thing pisses me off.

You’re looking for a page that does not exist… It’s been blown away into the aether. Perhaps you should use the search function? Maybe you just want to go to the front page for this blog? Maybe somewhere more exotic?