Hacking and Making Stuff
Hacking is moving into the mainstream. O’Reilly has their successful “Hacks” series of books and people just can’t resist finding out how things work and making them better. 2600 is now 20 years old and they’re still as relevant as ever (maybe even more now). Lately I’ve been thinking about hacking and making stuff a lot. I listened to the Paul Graham talk about hackers and painters with Doug Kaye thanks to IT Conversations. I have to get Paul Graham’s book, named Hackers and Painters which collects some of his essays together. Then over the past few weeks I found myself looking at not martha and reading about the early 2005 launch of Make from O’Reilly. Make is halfway between a book and a magazine and it’s going to be filled with stuff to make. I’m looking forward to it. This blog runs with the tiny and cool Blosxom Perl script and I’ve been looking at Ruby and the very cool Instiki Wiki which is written in Ruby. People are doing some great stuff with simple technologies. But it’s not only the new stuff that is cool. I also saw someone repair a chair and glue it together using rope clamps. Just simple twine tied to itself and tightened with a wooden dowel. It’s efficient, environmentally-friendly and cheap. I have to start making more stuff myself.
One of the fascinating things about looking at older political thrillers is to see how the political world of the film has changed. Common knowledge and assumptions no longer hold. Assumptions about race, class, and gender have shifted and our view of what works and what doesn’t changes as well. That being said, 
