Hunting the wild hacker

Day 3: My neighbor the sysadmin pulls me over. KDE 2.0 is up and running smoothly, and he's as happy with the result as a 3-year-old who has just constructed a tower out of alphabet blocks. He says 2.0 is much nicer than 1.0., and the 2.4 kernel screams along. In toto, the improvements justify his hackerist faith in progress. The code will improve!

I can't resist telling him that I've just read on News.com that 2.4.1 is now available, and it is supposed to have a built-in journaling file system. His eyes widen -- somehow he missed the news. Maybe because he and the other sysadmins were too busy upgrading Salon's version of BIND after a CERT advisory of a major security weakness. Sysadmins take such advisories seriously.

I knew the news about the journaling file system would tweak him though, because earlier that day I had heard him arguing with another programmer over how well a Linux or FreeBSD system would respond to a sudden power loss. (In California, sudden power losses are inexplicably on everybody's mind.) The other programmer is recalling how he once conducted a test in which he literally kicked a computer's power cord out of a wall socket, on purpose. The point is to see how well the computer comes back to life after regaining power. Does it boot back up gracefully without losing data, or does it choke and sputter?

Linux-based systems traditionally have not had a good reputation for coming back online intact after an abrupt power failure. That's something that the addition of a journaling file system is supposed to address. There are several projects in effect aimed at putting together an open-source journaling system, and the news that one of those projects is now incorporated in the kernel was a tidbit that would make any Linux geek's heart swell with pride.

The sysadmin glances, almost unwillingly, at his desktop. Pretty soon, it's going to be time to start all over -- to grab the new kernel from the Net, rebuild it and take it for a ride.

It looks like fun. And hacking is fun, except, of course, when it isn't: When you're wrestling with some horrible bug that you simply can't isolate. When you have to solve a "mission-critical" problem in an absurdly short period of time. When you've been up five days straight and you still don't have code ready to ship.

Sometimes the code just gets to you, not in a good way, and you have to stop what you're doing, as my cube neighbor does on occasion, and pull out a guitar and strum a few relaxing notes.

The first time I saw him do that, I did a double take. Is this guy working or just playing around? Aren't we all under incredible pressure to fix things, now? How can he get away with riffing on a guitar?

Not long after that, I decided it helped me relax too when he played, and I stopped worrying about it. And then I read what is probably the central thesis of "The Hacker Ethic."

Hackers do not feel that leisure time is automatically any more meaningful than work time. The desirability of both depends on how they are realized. From the point of a view of a meaningful life, the entire work/leisure duality must be abandoned. As long as we are living our work or our leisure, we are not even truly living. Meaning cannot be found in work or leisure but has to arise out of the nature of the activity itself. Out of passion. Social value. Creativity.

We should all be more like hackers, whether we can afford to or not.

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