Uncategorised – Page 15 – Jack Scott's Blog

30 Days of Geek #14: Favourite computer conference?

I’ve decided to partake in Jethro Carr’s 30 Days of Geek challenge, so I’ll be writing a post a day on my geekiness for an entire month! You can find all the posts in one spot here.

Seeing as I’ve never been to one (yet) I can’t really have a favourite. However, I’ve been to the National Computer Science School (ie computer camp) and it was possibly the most fun I’ve ever had in my life. A week of writing scripts in Python, having access to powerful computers and a fast Internet connection, and most importantly, making friends.

During the week we had to write a search engine spider as part of a website we built for a charity. My fondest memory of the week is, along with my good friend Michael Wheeler, modifying the spider and setting it to work downloading as much of the Internet as we could before Python crashed. It took a while.

I’m looking forward to attending linux.conf.au (named after its domain name) in Brisbane in January 2011. It should be a blast.

30 Days of Geek #13: How did you become such a geek? Career? Personal interest?

I’ve decided to partake in Jethro Carr’s 30 Days of Geek challenge, so I’ll be writing a post a day on my geekiness for an entire month! You can find all the posts in one spot here. Apologies for the lateness of today’s post, I was busy yesterday.

It was such a long time ago that I became a geek that I’ve sort of forgotten how it came to be.

Back when I was around 14 or so my stepfather bought me and my brother a computer, to stop us using his office computer to play games. As well as playing countless hours of Age of Empires and Grand Theft Auto, I spent quite a lot of time ‘making my computer better’, which really involved breaking it and having to reinstall Windows every few months.

Even before that though, I was messing around with a BASIC interpreter (QBASIC on MS-DOS) on the office computer… it must have been back in 1998-1999. I thought “Hello, world!” was a masterpiece. For a 9 or 10-year old, I guess it was. At that stage, anyway. I’ve met 13-year olds writing operating systems now. Kids these days.

It’s definitely personal interest, but I hope to make it into a career.

30 Days of Geek #12: What area do you want to expand your skills into?

I’ve decided to partake in Jethro Carr’s 30 Days of Geek challenge, so I’ll be writing a post a day on my geekiness for an entire month! You can find all the posts in one spot here.

Two words: System Administration.

At the moment, that’s the main area where I really want more skills. I can do a bit, but I want to do much more. I’ll consider myself well on my way when I have finally set up a UNIX-based email server from scratch that’s capable of hosting multiple email addresses on multiple domains.

It’s not strictly geek related, but I also want to develop much better skills in the people area, both socially and in the management area. Being a polyglot or a polymath wouldn’t be bad either.

My eventual goal in life is to know everything about everything, have been everywhere, and have done everything. And have lots of fun along the way.

30 Days of Geek #11: Favourite hacking environment – music, light, seating, etc

I’ve decided to partake in Jethro Carr’s 30 Days of Geek challenge, so I’ll be writing a post a day on my geekiness for an entire month! You can find all the posts in one spot here.

First up, music. 99% of the time I have iTunes playing a random mix of songs from my collection. Around 60% of my collection is older stuff like Pink Floyd (the best band ever), The Beatles (the second best band ever) and Eric Clapton (he’s just this guy, you know?). The rest is made up of albums from the mid-90s onwards, most of which has been heard on Triple J at some point. The other 1% of the time I’m listening to Triple J itself via an Internet stream. Normally I just listen to it in the car.

As for lighting, I prefer the evening, but I’ll work during any sensible time of the day. There’s a particular time in the morning where the sun shines directly onto my face through the window when I’m sitting at my desk. This is when I have breakfast. My day is usually spent doing interesting stuff that doesn’t involve computers. The evening is when I get my geeking done.

As for the physical environment involving desks and chairs and beds (oh my!) I have two favourite spots:

My Desk. Humble apologies for the awful photography.

The desk is from Officeworks, and is brilliant. The chair is a moderately comfortable loan (I’ve had it almost 18 months now though) from my father.

My Bed. "Lost Ears" is sitting comfortably.

This is where the thinking happens. My fountain pen and Moleskine notebook (I’m a brand whore) sit on the desk just to the right of the picture.

30 Days of Geek #10: My primary computer.

I’ve decided to partake in Jethro Carr’s 30 Days of Geek challenge, so I’ll be writing a post a day on my geekiness for an entire month! You can find all the posts in one spot here.

Today it’s all about my computer. Currently I only have one computer, a laptop. This is unlike quite a few other geeks, and very unlike myself in the past. I’ve had 3 or 4 working computers, plus lots of spare parts. I now have 1 working computer, and a few spare parts.

So, this laptop. It’s an ASUS UL20A ultra-portable laptop. Halfway in between a netbook and a full-sized laptop, it’s just that perfect compromise between portability and usability.

Specifications:

Intel CPU, 1.3GHz dual-core. Surprisingly, this actually feels really snappy. It’s amazing how we’ve got used to this natural progression in computing for faster and faster, when we actually don’t need it for a lot of tasks.
2GiB of DDR2 RAM. This, on the other hand, isn’t enough. As this post is being published, there’s another 2GiB in the mail, to make a new total of 4GiB.
250GB SATA HDD. Plenty. My movie collection is stored on an external drive.
12″ screen, 1366 x 768 pixels. It would be nice to have more (isn’t it always true?) however this much allows me to get what I need to do done. It’s also a 16×9 aspect ratio, which is very nice for watching videos.
Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit. See yesterday’s post for why.
There are some other specifications, but I can’t remember what they are, and don’t really care.

I’ve also been told to share a screenshot of my computer. Well, here it is: