Geekery

Geek God – Dries Buytaert

Posted on 02. Mar, 2010 by Jake.

NOTE: We will be changing the Geek God section to feature local geek icons. For now, unfortunately, the post I wrote with details on this has been lost in the ether during our migration of Geekery to a new server. We will be reposting that one soon, but for now, here’s one last look at an international Geek God before we shift our focus to leading local geeks.

You can keep your rock stars and your famous sportsmen and your literary icons. While normal people are busy worshiping these characters, true geeks, particularly programmers and developers, have different heroes. A developer who has written an impressive and game changing system, platform or app will be spoken about in hushed tones and hailed as a hero. And no developer is held up on a higher platform than open source programmer Dries Buytaert, who is the original creator of the Drupal CMS.

For those not up to speed with Drupal, it is a great open source CMS. It can be used to create anything from small personal blogs to important and powerful corporate and government websites. While WordPress is the blogging CMS for the common blogger, Drupal is the developer’s choice. It has also been described as “the Linux of the internet”, and if Drupal is Linux than Word Press would be equivalent to Windows. It also boasts an extremely active and engaged community, which sets it apart from other, similar platforms.

Buytaert is from Belgium, and his claims to fame other than creating Drupal include founding Acquia, which seeks to be to Drupal what Red Hat is to Linux, and launching Mollom, a state-of-the-art spam-busting service. “Mollom’s purpose is to dramatically reduce the effort of keeping your site clean and the quality of your content high. Currently, Mollom is a spam-killing one-two punch combination of a state-of-the-art spam filter and CAPTCHA server.” Over 4,000 websites are protected by the Mollom service. More than 100,000 messages are being analyzed every day.”

He has a PHD in Computer Science and Engineering from Belgium’s University of Ghent and has won numerous awards, including being voted one of the Top 5 most influential people in open source by MindTouch in 2009. His allegiance to open source has gotten him called “the anti-Bill Gates”, but he himself rejected the tag, blogging that he isn’t comfortable with being branded anti-Microsoft.

For one of the most highly rated programmers in the World, he is surprisingly humble, and has a sense of humour. His website’s somewhat self-depricating bio admits that “sometimes people laugh at his hair, but he is cool with that”. The man is a true geek icon.

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Geek God – Jack Dorsey

Posted on 18. Jan, 2010 by Jake.

Twitter creator Jack Dorsey helped transform the way the world communicates online. A true geek god, we owe him credit every time we tweet.

Weighing in at 138 characters, the above sentence summarises the content of this entire article, and, in the process, demonstrates the primary way that Twitter has changed the way we communicate – it has forced us to say less and reminded us of the importance of brevity, of stripping information of the unimportant frills and keeping it to the essentials. Twitter teaches us that if it can’t be said in140 characters or less it’s not worth saying.

“Simplicity, constraint and craftsmanship”, may sound like the slogan for an executive class automobile, but it is actually the personal guiding principles by which Dorsey lives his life. A cursory look at the site shows that these principles are very much in place. The social networking site (although Dorsey himself has rejected the term, stating that he sees Twitter’s role as spreading information rather than helping people socialize) is like Facebook grown-ups, there are no quizzes, no photos, no silly applications, no long comment threads. Instead, Twitter is all about the business, consisting of nothing but status updates of 140 characters or less. It provides a simple and effective way for you to inform people on where you’re at, and more importantly a way of seeing where, from friends to colleagues to one’s heroes to major companies and organisations.

Dorsey was a computer wizkid who was designing open source software in the area of dispatch routing at age 14. In 2000, at age 23, he started his own company, which dispatched couriers, taxis and emergency services from the web. It was then that he had his idea for a site that would allow users to communicate through real-time status updates. This would eventually lead to Twitter when Dorsey teamed up with Biz Stone (formerly from the company Odeo) and Evan Williams (who had worked for Google, selling them his two inventions – Blogger and Pyra Labs), and within 2 weeks they had made his idea a reality.

The rest, as they say, is history – we all know about how Twitter quickly became one of the most important forces on the internet. Interestingly, the site has no direct way of creating revenue, and for quite some time people have been speculating that Twitter will start charging users to use its service. That may be Twitter’s greatest ever test – if they can charge their users and still remain relevant and popular, than their position as one of the most powerful sources of information globally will be entrenched.

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Geek God – Gene Roddenberry

Posted on 21. Dec, 2009 by Jake.

In the geek realm, your choice of viewing material is a highly contentious issue. There are Star Wars Geeks and Lord of the Rings Geeks, Babylon 5 obsessives and even a few lowly Buffy freaks. But, like them or loathe them, no army of geek fans has as many legions or is as obsessive as the common trekkie – a devotee of the television and film franchise Star Trek. Whether you think this is a good or bad thing depends largely on whether or not you are ‘one of them’. While lacking the, um, star power of George Lucas, Star Trek inventor Gene Roddenberry is pretty much worshipped by most of Star Trek’s greatest devotees. And I would imagine that being worshipped by some of the world’s saddest people (and before you get violent remember, some of my best friends are trekkies) is better than not being worshipped at all.

Even as a non-trekkie I have to admit that the universe Roddenberry created in Star Trek is extremely complex and well-realised. And, while Star Wars has a plot that revolves around bland themes of good vs evil, Star Trek, as fans would tell you, offers complex commentary that has tackled important issues including war and peace, authoritarianism, imperialism, class warfare, economics, racism, religion, human rights, sexism and the role of technology. Roddenberry said that the only way you could comment on controversial issues in 1960s in America was through allegory. “[By creating] a new world with new rules, I could make statements about sex, religion, Vietnam, politics, and intercontinental missiles. Indeed, we did make them on Star Trek“.

Star Trek was far from an instant success – the original show was constantly threatened with cancellation, and was kept on air only by the dedicated letter-writing of a few fanatical fans before getting cancelled in its third season. But the franchise, already a huge hit among its followers, started to grow. And grow. No other series is responsible for as many spin-offs. Since the original sixties series, Star Trek went on to become an animated series in the seventies, then the Next Generation in the 80s and 90s, before spawning Deep Space Nice, Voyager and Enterprise. There have been 11 feature films – the latest, 2009’s unimaginatively titled Star Trek, was hugely successful and renewed interest in the franchise – and a 12th is on the way. There have also been too many books, games and comics to mention. And, although Star Trek has been doing just fine since Roddenberry’s death in 1991, Roddenberry is missed, and is still a god to his fans, who affectionately call him the ‘Great Bird of the Galaxy’.

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Geek God – David Gemmell

Posted on 15. Dec, 2009 by Jake.

This may come as a bit of a shock to those of you who are fans of both Gemmell and this blog – but I’m not a fan. Nonetheless, such a large number of my geek compadres idolise the late fantasy author so much so that I am forced to declare him a Geek God. While detractors like me find his stuff a tad repetitive, a friend of mine and a rabid fan of Gemmell’s says “I don’t care if he writes the same story over and over again – it’s a great story.”

Gemmell (August 1, 1948 – July 28, 2006) wrote over thirty novels and has sold millions of copies worldwide. Interestingly, he grew up in a poor, urban area of London and his father left at an early age, which led to him being mercilessly teased as a child. However contrary to those who may think that due to his status as a Geek God David Gemmell must have been weedy, he was actually very tough and hardcore. Although he preferred reading books to physical activity his dad convinced him to take up boxing as a way of toughening up. It worked. Gemmell was expelled from school at the age of sixteen for organizing a gambling syndicate and was arrested several times while still under 20. He later became a construction worker and a bouncer at nightclubs, before his mum set him up an interview with a London newspaper. Apparently, Gemmell was hired despite having no experience because he was very arrogant during the job interview, which his future employers mistook for confidence. At any rate, this job started him on a journey as a writer, which would culminate in Gemmell having his first novel published at age 36.

Gemmell’s first and most successful book, called Legend, was published in 1984. Since then he churned them out, until his unexpected death from a heart attack in 2006. His books, as those who have read them will know, are heroic fantasy novels, usually with tons of violence and a super-macho hero who kicks ass and takes names throughout. Why do geeks love reading about men so far removed from their own world of desks and PCs? Whatever the reason, the amount of bona-fide geeks who have become obsessed with the worlds Gemmell created for you to escape to earn him his place in the pantheon of Geek Gods.

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Geek God – Stephen Hawking

Posted on 27. Nov, 2009 by Jake.

Many Geek icons refute the notion that, as a man, you need to be big and athletic to succeed in life. But no one symbolises the triumph of brains over brawn as much as UK theoretical physicist Steven Hawking. Despite having neuro muscular dystrophy that has rendered him completely paralysed, Hawking is one of the most celebrated scientists living today.

In 1988 his book A Brief History of Time became a best seller, a turn of events that surprised even Hawking himself. Other than the book, though, the man’s achievements are hard to explain in layman’s terms. Hawking’s early work involved the proving of singularity theorems, which provide a set of sufficient conditions for the existence of singularity in space-time. He went on to develop important theories regarding The Big Bang and black holes. His studies have since focussed on a bewildering array of physics phenomenon including “quantum cosmology, cosmic inflation, helium production in anisotropic Big Bang universes, large N cosmology, the density matrix of the universe, topology and structure of the universe, baby universes, Yang-Mills instantons and the S matrix gravitational radiation and wormholes” to name a few. You know, the usual. Notably, in the last few decades he has also been one of the most outspoken voices in creating awareness of environmental issues.

Hawking’s trophy cabinet is a particularly impressive one – he has been heaped with accolades since 1975, when he won the Eddington Medal, his latest being the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the US’s highest civilian honour, awarded to him by Barack Obama this year. He has had statues built in his likeness (including one at Cape Town’s African Institute for Mathematical Sciences) and institutes named after him.

He has also kept himself in the popular culture limelight, appearing as himself on The Simpsons and Futurama, being portrayed in a few episodes of Family Guy (they recreated his voice using a Macintosh voice synthesiser) and even becoming something of a pop star – his actual voice has been featured on the Pink Floyd track ‘Keep Talking’, and he has been fictionalised as rapper MC Hawking.

And perhaps the most impressive bit is that Hawking has a sense of humour, not an easy thing to retain when fate has rendered you completely immobile. When asked what came before the Big Bang, he replied that it is a silly question, “like asking what lies North of the North pole”. A genius with a sense of humour, and a bonafide Geek God.

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