My Summer Hack Plans

By: Robert Turk

My summer seems fairly plotted out... I'm in an intensive learning environment here at IBM. Well, it's not like r&d or anything; I help "webmaster" a site knowledge-base. The idea is to have multitudes feeding the "machine" (there's really a network of machines) with the questions, answers, announcements, problems, solutions, etc. that arise about the AIX operating system. AIX is IBM's version on UNIX, the multitasking o/s that enable machines to communicate with one another in the language that makes the net possible. So, towards that end, I've been programming, writing, testing, and rewriting scripts that make web pages "live" in that they have access to all the latest input of the community. It's pretty exciting. I mean, yeah, this is a fairly industrial UNIX, but I've programmed in perl, which has versions on almost every cool computer platform, and unix shell. I'm learning Java (slowly -- it's an object-oriented fully-fledged programming language, like C++, and not coming as easily as perl did for some reason) and JavaScript, a Netscape-originating scripting language that adds a lot of functionality on the client-side of the "client/server" relationship, such as between a web server and a web browser. In any case, lest I terrify you with a bunch of technocrap, there's other things going on in my life (thankfully); I have a fairly serious girlfriend. She teaches at a Montessouri school in Hyde Park (Austin neighborhood) and is going to study Biology and Ecology at UT's School of Natural Sciences in September. She was at Purdue for awhile, and she's a few months older than me, but she moved to Austin and it's taken her awhile to get re-enrolled. (let that be a lesson to present and future H.S. kids who think they can quit school and then start right back up again -- it's not that easy!) She and I are moving downtown in 5 or 6 weeks, to live off of 1st St. This way, I'll be able to ride my bike easily to Barton Springs, Zilker Park, and downtown. Also, I've been playing music with friends regularly and having fun with that. I bought an electric guitar -- a '64 Gibson MelodyMaker, but my amp is this puny Fender Champ Amp that's little, but since it's got tubes in it (versus solid-state) it sounds cool. Just not loud enough. Oh well. I have my parents' piano, and I've been trying to learn how to make more than just "sounds" on it. I've been trying to write as much as possible, most of it being published on my very own website http://www.megalith.com, I don't know if you have access to the web, or how interminible the wait would be to check out. I've got paintings by my friend Patrick, an illustrated poem by me, and an online-novel-in-progress, which has the same title as a book I wrote 3 years ago and printed like 25 copies of...it actually sold a few copies at a bookstore on the Drag. (Guadalupe St. in Austin) But it's wacky. You have to use Netscape 2.0 or later because most of the site is benefitted by the use of Frames. If you don't know what that is, get Navigator and see the difference online. In any case, I have to finish this cup of coffee, read an announcement about the overturning of the un-Constitutional CDA provisions of the recent Telecommunications Reform Act (1996) by a three-judge panel in Philadelphia. It is insane to think that our government, or any government that respects the freedoms guaranteed in the Bill of Rights, would want to threaten anyone who "publishes" online (read: sends an email or USENET post) with $100,000 fines and jail time for patently non-descript offenses like being "indecent". Like, I may find George Bush's pardons handed out to his buddy's after the Iran-Contra fallout had "passed" an indecency, while my Grandfather would find mentioning "alcohol", "dancing", or discussions of personal habits or problems indecent. Which of us is right? The interesting thing is that we _both_ are right...everyone can decide what they choose to view online, and parents can get software to screen accesses to questionable sites on the client0-side. No such provision can be made on the server-side, because its not like a machine can discern a cryptic "Port 80 Request -- GET url..." and extrapolate things like requester's age or social status. And we certainly won't have our Government, Court, or peer pressure dictate to us what we can say (unless we just overturn the Constitution, which specifically forbids the Government from doing so!) So I'm doing my part by encouraging debate. If you believe that the Government should dictate to its citizens what we will write in e-mails to friends, neighbors, coworkers, relatives, or post to discussion groups or onto web sites...then you have a bigger problem than kids occasionally stumbling upon imagery online (that takes 20 minutes to download over a 14.4k modem) and asking some challenging questions... Of course, I'm speaking rhetorically here...I know you guys believe that yes, parents need to be involved in their kids lives, and they need to give the kids the opportunity to learn (the net is the ultimate teacher's assistant/encyclopedia) while safe. I think that more than restrictions though, parents should be able to raise their kids and invest many more hours with them than is possible if both parents are working 40-hour weeks. I'm saying our culture needs a more fundamental shift than I've heard any politico talking about; we need to redefine the importance of the family unit as the premiere socializing agent in the world... a real live web of commitment, dreams, promises, ideas, and compromises. Marshall McLuhen tried to explain that humans _need_ extensions of themselves in order to be true to themselves. These extensions have been gods, families, tools, languages, and technologies, and the latest extension -- into a common pool of living information with the Internet -- will change the way we live, learn, communicate, buy, sell, trade, love, and share. It is something to be defended, though it was designed to withstand a nuclear attack. I think it can withstand the raging of the princes of old media and old technology -- and old civilization and culture -- as they stumble, like King Lear, into the present. I guess the thing to defend is the rights of ordinary citizens to learn and communicate with one another, as peers, without the "benevolent hand" of 80-something patricians trying to guide us back to the time when communication was not free, information was not free, data was not free, and neither were most of the people. For more info on the CDA, check out http://www.cdt.org/ciec/ For more on Marshall McLuhan: http://www.magic.ca/mcl-prj For more info on the web, the definitive place to learn is the Web Developer's Virtual Library, a 5 star site to be sure: http://WWW.Stars.com/Seminars/