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Geekophilia

Computers, software, and gadgets for writers

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Why Python on Windows XP?

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If you don’t know any computer languages, I recommend starting with Python. It is cleanly designed, well documented, and relatively kind to beginners. Despite being a good first language, it is not just a toy; it is very powerful and flexible and well suited for large projects. From How To Become A Hacker, by Eric S. Raymond, author of The Cathedral and the Bazaar and Why Python? Why Python On Windows XP? Python is an interpreted programming language. On Windows, amateurs (like me) use it as a scripting language. If you’ve dabbled in creating macros in Microsoft Word or experimented with various hot-key or keyboard macro programs, you have a mere inkling of how useful a scripting language can be. Learning to program in a REAL computer language, like Python, enables you to make small, fast, accurate, customized scripts and “applets” that do exactly what you want them to do on your computer. A simple example will suffice. Isn’t Google Desktop Search handy? Yes. Sometimes. But how often does your search produce “179 emails, 468 files, 273 Web History.” Instead of loading huge indexing programs to find a single file, wouldn’t it be nice if you could type a few […]

Genesys: EULA For The Universe

Genesys: EULA For The Universe

“Hands” graphic Copyright © 2008 by David Day. Excerpted from Rapture For The Geeks, by Richard Dooling. Genesys: EULA For The Universe Copyright © 2008 Richard Dooling – All Rights Reserved In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. Software and hardware He created them. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the garbled video display. The Spirit of God was moving over the waters, searching for the power switch, so He could reboot the Universe in Safe Mode, get to the desktop, and reconfigure the screen resolution. Then God declared some global environmental variables by saying, “Let there be light” and there was light. And God assigned the value of “good” to the light; and in binomial fashion God partitioned the light from the darkness. God called the light Day (let light = Day = 1), and the darkness he called Night (let darkness = Night = 0). And there was Evening (0) + Morning (1) = Day (1). And God said, “Let there be a FIRMAMENT in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters.” Now, in the beginning, the Universe was not […]

Esquire Cover Immortal Man

Diary of an Immortal Man

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Short Fiction by Richard Dooling Diary Of An Immortal Man was a cover story for Esquire Magazine and was nominated for a National Magazine Award. The full text appears online at Kurzweil AI. Diary Of An Immortal Man is kinky science fiction and black comedy, inspired in part by Ray Kurzweil’s tremendous book, The Age Of Spiritual Machines; both speculate about what the future holds for us and our biotech lust for immortality.

vim7

User Interfaces Should Teach, Not Hide

Here’s a fresh look at the age-old tension between those who prefer the Command Line Interface (CLI) to the Graphical User Interface (GUI), by way of an example from my favorite text editor, Vim 7.0. Writing in the Free Software Magazine, Terry Hancock argues that user interfaces should teach, not hide. “The key concept here is that we should view GUIs not as an opaque layer to separate the digital classes, but as a convenience to make learning easier”. Probably the best essay on what some call “Interface Zen” is still Neal Stephenson’s In the Beginning was the Command Line, although it’s officially dated (written in 1999). Stephenson’s favorite operating system at the time was BeOS (now nearly extinct), but in a 2004 Slashdot interview, Stephenson wrote: “I embraced OS X as soon as it was available and have never looked back. So a lot of ‘In the Beginning was the Command Line’ is now obsolete. I keep meaning to update it, but if I’m honest with myself, I have to say this is unlikely.” In 2004, Garrett Birkel (with Neal Stephenson’s permission) republished Command Line, interspersing his own notes and comments, in an effort to bring the essay up […]