C.I.T.O.K.A.T.E.

A poster in Ops at U-Con advertised seeking geeks to be interviewed, for an honors thesis about geek culture. So I emailed Rachel Yung at and signed up. If you self-identify as a geek, Rachel wishes you to do likewise. Here is a transcript of the interview.
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I have higher Google PageRank than any other Matt Arnold on the web except for the fictional character in "Big Trouble". Ironically, by linking to this, I'm exacerbating the situation.

Surfing the search results far enough, you will come to a piece of amateur avante-garde experimental music with a title that happens to contain my name. Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you: "Disaster In Matt Arnold's Pants" by MC Iedh.

Today I wanted to make some corrections to the HTML of one of my old web pages to make it compliant with the standards of the Firefox web browser. So I saved the webpage on my Linux computer. I opened the HTML file in Text Editor and was pleased that it made the markup tags a variety of different colors. This visual aid made the work go much faster.

I looked in the Applications menu and was surprised that I didn't see an FTP client with which to send the file to my web space. So I looked in Synaptic Package Manager. The closest thing to what I wanted seemed to be this:
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"There are over 8 billion web pages. Most of them suck." --Outfoxed

brendand noticed in my last post that I applied tags to it. Tags are important. Google succeeded because they realized you can't hierarchically categorize the web like Yahoo tried to do. Unfortunately Google is getting inundated with people cheating its page-rank system. The web will soon depend on metadata, which usually takes the form of descriptive keyword tags. But the only people who can possibly apply them to 8 billion webpages is... everybody.

Who here does social bookmarking? Post here with your bookmark page so I can browse it. Mine is at http://del.icio.us/Matt_Arnold. del.icio.us is a service that lets you apply keyword tags to your favorite sites the way that Flickr has tags for pictures. You can browse the most popular bookmarks on the internet from day to day.

You can even set up the popular list as a drop-down menu from your bookmark toolbar in Firefox. (What? You're still using Explorer? No wonder your computer is infested with spyware/adware/viruses. Get Firefox! It is a thing of beauty.) Just like the web changed from something you browse into something you you search, now feeds are changing it to streams of delivered headlines that you subscribe to. Firefox has a feed-reader built-in: on a page that offers a feed, just click the orange button on the lower right corner of the browser to subscribe.

Another form of social websurfing is the Firefox extension Outfoxed. You get a new button on your interface that will let you rate a web domain as good, bad or dangerous. Your browser will access the reports of your friends who have the extension, so that a global network of votes and comments emerges.

If you're using Firefox instead of Explorer to surf the web, you can install an extension called Greasemonkey. This allows the user to change specific sites they visit. The site that shows up in your browser will look as if that site's creators had intended it to be that way. Different scripts are written every day for you to download: Take all the ads off of Google. Or display competitor's prices on every book you look at in Amazon. Or put very useful persistent searches in Gmail. Or put a link on every movie in Netflix to a BitTorrent download of that movie. You might detect a common thread: most of these uses for Greasemonkey circumvent or disrupt the business model of people making money with the web. Perhaps by using a Greasemonkey script on a site you would be helping to kill that site's viability? Give some thought to each application of Greasemonkey before using it.

One technical problem with Greasemonkey is that certain wrongheaded types of scripts for it, such as generating a reputation on every site you visit by going out to every other site related to it, can generate ridiculous un-necessary web traffic for which there does not exist enough resources. The way I see it, this is analogous to every internet user becoming a reverse spammer. Use Greasemonkey with care-- but there is no question that this is a whole new web.

Reason #1. The ability to get good things done.

The internet is a world I spend a lot of time in. I'll say to a friend "this page of our organization needs to say this instead of that" and they'll direct me to somebody who is a gatekeeper when I'd rather just have the power to Do It. I found out recently from Blasted Bill and phecda that unless the cable company objects, a private consumer could actually host a web site in one's own home on a perfectly normal computer. My cousin iamgeek revealed to me that a "web server" is a piece of software, not hardware. It even comes bundled with Linux!

Not that it does me any good, yet. All too often (such as when I got a paid LJ account and looked at the features) I read jargon like CGI and Apache and PHP which, until yesterday, I assumed to be a special type of computer hardware only available to ISPs. No longer will I slink away in defeat at their mere mention. Not even when the so-called "Beginner's" Guide/Overview to Python contains gibberish like "object-oriented" and "regular expression" in its first few sentences. There's gotta be a class I can take, but how do I choose which one to take when programming, using a UNIX command-line interface, and web administration, all seem to blur together? Where does one of them end and another begin?

Reason #2. Friends.

So there are several problems that learning how to program will eventually solve, someday. But I want to be a hacker, at least an initiate, because wherever all the coolest and most interesting activities are going on, one half is cool and interesting and the other half is unintelligible. This is a sign that I have no earthly business not being a hacker.