My Attempt at Hackerdom

hacker /n./
[originally, someone who makes furniture with an axe]

1. A person who enjoys exploring the details of programmable systems and how to stretch their capabilities, as opposed to most users, who prefer to learn only the minimum necessary.
2. One who programs enthusiastically (even obsessively) or who enjoys programming rather than just theorizing about programming.
3. A person capable of appreciating hack value.
4. A person who is good at programming quickly.
5. An expert at a particular program, or one who frequently does work using it or on it; as in 'a Unix hacker'. (Definitions 1 throught 5 are correlated, and people who fit them congregate.)
6. An expert or enthusiast of any kind. One might be an astronomy hacker, for example.
7. One who enjoys the intellectually challenge of creatively overcoming or circumventing limitations.
8. [deprecated] A malicious meddler who tries to discover sensitive information by poking around. Hence 'password hacker', 'network hacker'. The correct term for this sense is cracker.

From The Jargon File.

News

Wednesday, April 14th, 1999 15:05 EST

How do you like the new background? Inspired by the movie "The Matrix", except with Bopomofo instead of Katakana.

Tuesday, April 13th, 1999 03:01 EST

Fixes some spelling errors on the main page. Thanks Sera. Put up the new Emacs image. Working on getting these pages HTML 4 compliant. i.e. Style sheets.

Saturday, April 3rd, 1999 12:27 EST

Finally got this thing up. Fortunecity was doing something to their ftp server yesterday.

Friday, April 2nd, 1999. 01:16 EST

Wow! 7 hours of writing. I forget how long-winded I can be. It's been a while since I've written prose.

Thursday, April 1st, 1999. about 18:00 EST

So I decide that today would be just as good as any to really work on my webpage. I've been putting it off for a while, mainly because of school and pure laziness. But it's Easter weekend, and with a 4 day weekend, there really is no excuse to not get something done. So besides doing my income tax return, doing my Computer Science 273 and 302 homework, studying for finals, and catching up on sleep, I'll be working on this page.

As you may have deduced from the title of this page in, this is a log of me trying to gain acceptance as a Hacker. By putting up this webpage I may have blown all my chances at being recognized as a hacker, but I think that this will be educational to me, and to others about the process, and the work involved with hacking and recognition. Maybe this site will encourage some other hacker wannabees to achieve there goals. Maybe it will discourage others. Hopefully people will glean something out of all of this and quit flooding the GNOME mailing list (and others) with the same 5 questions. ;) Mostly, this will be a site that contains my knowledge for others to glean from. So expect this site to be eclectic. Not everything will be related to computers.

The first thing up is my history with computers. It's long, digresses a lot, and is maybe a bit egotistical, but it helps to see where you're coming from. So here is My History with Computers.

Next is my reasons to want to become hacker and how I plan to attain my goal. Check out my Battle Plan.

Road to Hackerdom pages.

1. My History with Computers.
2. Battle Plan.
3. State of my comuputer.
4. HTML page.
5. Linux page.
6. GNOME page.
7. Enlightenment window manager page.

Links to some of my other pages.

• Check out my resumé
• My recent web project on tournament trees for McGill's CS undergraduate Data Structures and Algorithms course.

Current Pending Question:
Why is my moniker "MaSee" and what does it mean?
Be the first person to e-mail me the right answer and maybe you'll get a prize. We'll think of something.