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User since: Oct 07, 2004 at 05:37 UTC (19 years ago)
Last here: Jul 27, 2021 at 06:41 UTC (3 years ago)
Experience: 2751
Level:Deacon (12)
Writeups: 469
Location:Fort Collins, Colorado
User's localtime: Mar 28, 2024 at 13:41 UTC
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long hair != female
Name space: apotheon
Personality: INT(J/p)
Offsite: Blogstrapping
Hire me: Chad Perrin


STATISTICS

Age: older than I look, younger than I feel
Eyes: myopic and blue
Hair: long story
Height: 5'8", last I checked
Weight: about five minutes or so
Note to Self:

  1. 07 October 2004
  2. 18 October 2004
  3. 18 October 2004
  4. 19 October 2004
  5. 21 October 2004
  6. 23 November 2004


I am called to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.


MENU
More to come. . . .

An individual is better judged by the quality of its enemies than by the quantity of its friends.


SECTIONS

About Me I'm a third-generation computer geek. Well, sort of a generation 2.5 computer geek — the grandfather has certainly been more computer-inclined than most his age, though he doesn't qualify as any kind of geek by today's standards. Both parents have been working with computers for about as long as I've been alive. It's in my blood, I suppose. I'm even named after computer-generated confetti.

I first stumbled across Perl as a means of making webpages more functional. I then fell into Unix, and discovered there's far more to the pathologically eclectic rubbish lister than meets the average websurfer's eye. PerlMonks has helped motivate me to learn more.

I have been the WikiMedia Foundation's first paid employee, the network administrator for a company full of rocket scientists, and a writer of many articles for TechRepublic and some Pathfinder Roleplaying Game materials for a British publisher.

Sometimes, I'm not so good at this "user bio" stuff. Obviously.


I sense a great disturbance in the Source, as though millions of bugs cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.


My Philosophy I jokingly call myself a Ferrotheist: I believe in an omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent Iron. I'll have to lay that out in more detail at some future time.

More seriously, I'm something of a Taoist, as regards metaphysics (that is to say, ontologically and epistemologically). I operate on default assumptions of an empiricist, for the most part — approaching the philosophical basis of Objectivism, in fact, though without any particular relation to the practical form of it practiced by people associated with the Ayn Rand Institute (who some call "randroids"). I don't believe the world is strictly as represented by the empirical so much as operate on that assumption simply because it makes sense to do so in absence of direct and verifiable evidence to the contrary.


Shakespeare was mistaken. The pun is the highest form of humor.


My Politics I'm a libertarian. I don't mean that in the sense of "I vote for those pro-business guys" or anything along those lines. I'm not strictly "pro-business", though I believe in the efficacy and ethical validity of free markets (that is, voluntary economic individualism). Rather, my libertarian political philosophy arises from my belief in a well-ordered, logically derived system of ethics that simply states as its primary tenet that the initiation of coercive relationships is wrong. That statement is often referred to as the Non-Aggression Principle, or NAP, in libertarian circles.

The progression of ideas that arises naturally and logically from the NAP leads me to a belief in the unethicality of the "intellectual property" system in this country (the United States of America), in the unethical status of corporate law here, and in the unethicality of systems of wealth redistribution through coercive taxation. The part of all this that is most relevant to PerlMonks is probably the bit about intellectual property. While I have minor ethical quibbles with some of the dominant open source licenses, the ideas behind free and open source software development are more in line with what I consider to be ethical practice than the proprietary model of software development.


The Bible was a misprint. The geek shall inherit the earth.


My System of Ethics I'm an ethical theorist. In fact, I'm more of an ethical theorist than I am most of the other things I say that I am, including:

Being an ethical theorist means, among other things, that I have spent a lot of time thinking about ethical theory, and have a very in-depth, comprehensive understanding of what "valid system of ethics" really means. Part of being an ethical theorist involves being a logician, however, and one of the direct results of being an ethical theorist (for me, at least) is being a libertarian.

Don't ask me to justify my statements about what constitutes a valid system of ethics unless you really want to know, and at that point you should be prepared for a virtual earful, and have some other venue for discussion in mind besides PerlMonks. It might be considered bad form to turn a discussion in PerlMonks into a book-length dissertation on the subject of the logical origins of ethics (and even that would be a summary: I am literally writing a book on the subject of constructing a valid ethical system).

Hopefully that clears a couple things up.


Question:  Is it a Perl program or a Perl s‎crip‎t?
Answer:  Yes.


Useful Links This is a collection of links that I'm mostly collecting for my own use, but you (if there are other readers out there) may find some of it useful as well.
7 Stages of Regex Users
Chatterbox Recent History (offsite)
Cross-platform development: editors
Re: Designing the programmer
Finding oldest file in directory
Free Perl Books
Hash lookups, Database lookups, and Scalability
if variants
ikegami (love for the button)
im2
Is it computationally expensive to return a large string (50-100 kB) from a sub?
Learning Perl as a First (programming) language
Make it good
New Monks
The path to mastery
Perl and CMS
Perl as a first language
Perl documentation documentation
Perl Idioms Explained
PMPlanet (offsite)
Programming & real life
quotes in Perl
Random thoughts on programming
range-based magical autoincrement
Things are not what they seem like.
Things I have learnt
turnstep
Vim for Perl developers


Except where text is quoted from material under other licenses or in the public domain, you can assume that (insofar as PerlMonks policy permits) everything I post in PerlMonks is distributed under the Open Works License.

Special Note: I've been called the Libertarian Kibo. How fun!