speak, it ain’t illegal yet

I just finished up my exams tonight and I was thinking about back when I started with computers. I was about 11-12 years old, and I was one of those sucker kids that wanted to be a “hacker”. So I found some group on IRC and told them I wanted to join. They said I had to prove myself by writing a piece of software. I was just learning C++ at the time and thought I should write an encryption program. Needless to say, it was very difficult. Luckily, a very nerdy friend of my brother, J.R. Wessels, was willing to help me. He made a deal that in exchange for helping me write an encryption program, I would help him work on writing a game. He walked me through the steps of creating a simple key based file encryption program that became known as Difro.

For those of you who remember the old Microsoft Visual C++ days, you could write a text program and it would be compiled into some ugly looking GUI with a text box and a little menu that could close the program or find about information. So I compiled the program and sent it off to the cool hacker group on IRC. When they got the program, they claimed that I didn’t write it. I asked them why? They said because the “About” dialog from the menu said Microsoft Windows. Therefore, the said, I had stolen it from Microsoft. I almost fell out of my chair from laughing. I may have been pretty young and naive, but that was just hilarious to me. Needless to say I didn’t join the hacker group.

It was a good learning experience though. From that day on, I realized a hacker wasn’t someone trying to impress another group, but rather someone just interested in wanting to learn, so that is what I did. I learned more C++, then some GUI programming with wxWindows(now wxWidgets), etc.

Learning was a lot of fun when you were learning just for fun. I remembered the first time I booted into Linux, it was almost magical! There were all these free games, free programs, all these new desktop options I had never even heard of before! I ended up having to buy an external serial modem, since the one I had was a soft modem, and back then there was zero support for them. When I finally was able to get on the Internet with Linux, I never went back. I started learning how to do other things, like setup my own firewall, did Network Address Translation, and even ended up setting up my own OpenMOSIX cluster using 10 i486 machines that I bought for a hundred dollars total.

Those were good times. I still have a lot of fun these days programming and researching, but I don’t think anything will ever beat those first magical moments when I was learning to write my own programs and use Linux.

I also learned another important fact. Without the help of J.R. Wessels, from helping me write my first C++ program to recompiling my first kernel, I would have never been where I am today. His unrelenting kindness and friendliness was the difference between me learning more than I probably ever would have. I try to return the same favor to other people just starting with programming and Linux whenever I can, and I encourage everyone else here to do the same thing. Being there and helping people out along the way for their first steps can really make a huge impact later on.

With that said I thought I would share a few pictures from my earlier days. The rest can be found here. Congratulations to all my friends graduating this year and those others who will be graduating in a few years. Just remember all the kind people that helped you along the way, and try to keep the spirit alive.