Comments on: How hard can it be to find geek friends?

By: Dossy

Dossy — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 21:21:36 +0000

foo: Interesting suggestion, but in my experience, con-goers are largely just poseurs. Have you met any real skilled programmers at a sci-fi con?

By: foo

foo — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 20:38:02 +0000

Simple look for a Sci-Fi convention in your area. Geeks abound! A large proportion of fandom are programmers or net admins and many aren’t dorks either (although some are.)

By: Dossy

Dossy — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 17:20:17 +0000

UberGeek: There’s a difference between geeks (those who do things because they can) vs. dorks (those people still living in their parents basement, wearing their Star Trek uniform, etc.).

I’m not interested in dorks. I want to meet geeks. People who take things apart (and put them back together again, _correctly_) to learn how they work. People who modify stuff (including software) out of curiosity as well as to suit their own needs. People who enjoy doing something for the sake of “the hack” value.

Whether I program in Tcl or not is largely irrelevant.

By: UberGeek

UberGeek — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 17:08:55 +0000

Dossy, you’re a Tcl/Tkl programmer. And I hate to be the geek that has to tell you this, but… …in Geek circles that’s just not cool. I can be rockin out to a Devo album, reviewing my DVD collection of Star Trek the Next Generation Season IV, and reviewing an EverQuest strategy book on how to succeed past 4327 hours of play. But when I hear that someone still programs in Tcl, I get seriously ill.

By: Dossy

Dossy — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 14:17:58 +0000

Pete: You mean, you’re using “http://raster.myopenid.com/” as your Identity URL and logged in successfully at myopenid.com and it wouldn’t treat you as authenticated in my blog comments?

When you say “failed,” exactly what do you mean? Do you get an error message of some sort? What is it?

By: Pete Prodoehl

Pete Prodoehl — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 13:57:06 +0000

Good luck finding your geek friends. I know it took me a while. Also, OpenID login did not work for me. I tried using by blog URL (which is set as a delegate) and that failed, and then tried using the real one at myopenid.com and that failed too.

By: Dossy

Dossy — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 13:02:14 +0000

Stephen: thanks–I’ve made a small change to try and normalize the URL as the spec. calls for. I’m glad that once the URL is normalized, that my OpenID consumer does actually work, though.

re: finding geeks, you’re definitely right, I’m making things a lot harder for myself. But, as I said, my previous lack of discrimination has yielded some good friends, but not what I … “emotionally” … need.

By: Stephen Harris

Stephen Harris — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 10:54:19 +0000

I’m definitely looking for a specific type of geek

Yeah, that’s gonna make life harder. The whole nature of internet collaborative development means that you can discuss projects and topics with someone 3500 miles away… but not find anyone to go down the pub with. That’s tough.

Good luck!

By: Stephen Harris

Stephen Harris — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 10:51:48 +0000

Re openID: Yeah, looks like it needed http:// prefix. Not what the spec says
http://openid.net/specs/openid-authentication-2_0-12.html

7.2. Normalization

The end user’s input MUST be normalized into an Identifier, as follows:
[...]
3. Otherwise, the input SHOULD be treated as an http URL; if it does not include a “http” or “https” scheme, the Identifier MUST be prefixed with the string “http://”.

By: Dossy

Dossy — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 04:30:07 +0000

re: LiveJournal OpenID, are you providing the URL as just “sweh.livejournal.com” or as “http://sweh.livejournal.com/”? I should probably default to the http scheme if it’s not a well-formed URL (i.e., doesn’t explicitly include the scheme), but I don’t yet–so, you need to enter it in explicitly.