geekitude

"Hello, my name is Diana, and I am a GEEK!"

To be called a geek used to be an insult, a term of abuse along with "nerd", "swot", "four-eyes" and other such charming childish epithets, which was hurled in the playground by the insecure, "in" crowd at anyone who happened to be slightly different, bookish, indifferent of popularity contests, or otherwise unlikely to ever become one of them.

These days, the geeks are having their revenge. Rich and successful geeks are everywhere, or at least they appear to be. There is even a Geek Pride Festival, a celebration of all things geek.

But amidst all this reclaiming of terminology, and proudly boasting Bill Gates as the World's Most Famous Geek, have we lost sight of what geeks really are ? Surely we should be looking to people like Richard Stallman as the real geeks, rather than one of the world's richest men ? Geeks do not crave popularity; in many cases they do not wish for it. They are passionate and unbudging over matters of ideology that most of the rest of the world care not one iota about. I may not be anything like as "pure" a geek as Richard Stallman, but when the chips are down I stand firmly on his side of the fence.

So what form does my geekiness take ? Well, I like computers. I like messing around with them, tinkering with them, using them, writing code for them. I depart from many geeks in that I am not a CLI (command line interface) purist, although vi and trn are my editor and newsreader of choice. A well-designed GUI (graphical user interface) can be very sexy. I meddle with GUI programming myself, and you can read my thoughts on GUI toolkits to use, and find some links to guides on good (and bad) ways of designing user interfaces. (Note: I'm not necessarily saying my GUIs are any good, just that I've tried to make them reasonably intuitive.

I'm also pretty opinionated about the languages that I choose to program in. I've tried a fair few over the years, and for the moment it's safe to say that I'm happiest programming in C++. I know that a lot of people hate C++, but I don't find it to be the screaming nightmare that many people do, and its way of doing things seems the closest match to my way of thinking. I wonder what that says about me as a person ?

And so on to operating systems. The only operating system I'm prepared to entertain the thought of in my home is Unix. Specifically Linux. Specifically Debian GNU/Linux. I'll use other Unices in the lab, but I prefer Linux. Hey, you can't teach an old dog new tricks, and I've been using Debian since version 0.93R6. I do not use Windows, even though most of the computer games I want to play I could only get under Windows. I may renege on this at some point, but the computer game I most want to replay ran on the Beeb anyway, so until I've got a working Beeb emulator, and have finished that game, I'm not desperate.

If it should happen that a client (specifically, in this case, the company who invented the material I am doing my PhD on) can only run software under Windows, I will cross-compile it using the mingw32 compiler under Linux, and then test the binaries under Windows on another computer. Yes, this makes life a bit awkward, but it's worth it to me.

If you're interested in the programs I've written, you might want to have a mosey around my codebox. There are descriptions here of the programs that I've either finished or nearly finished, as well as screenshots of these. There are also descriptions of "works in progress" and pie-in-the-sky projects that I might write one day when I get around to it. You won't find any binaries or sourcecode here at the moment -- most of the programs are very specific one-offs to solve one particular task, and so wouldn't be of any interest to people outside a very select and specialised community. If I'm wrong, drop me a line, and I'll think about whether to release them. Some of the "works in progress" will hopefully eventually be released, either under the GPL or under the wxWindows license.

Content and design by Diana Galletly. Last updated June 13th, 2000.