Luke Real Name:  Luke Age:  3^3+3 Resides:  Nashvegas, TN -- Eat more rhinestones! Occupation:  Self-unemployed founder of an OSS software startup.

Favorite website(s):
Boingboing.net and www.goats.com

Favorite book, movie, or TV show:
Godel, Escher, Bach (book); Seven Samurai (movie); Robot Chicken (TV show) 

Favorite game, application, or program of all time:
I'm a software hater, so it's hard to say -- they're each so painful in their own way.  The original Metroid?  Marathon 2: Durandal?  Rxvt? Ruby?  It pains me to say it, but I think Bash has probably helped me more than anything -- the thought of having to survive with just ksh until zsh showed up.... Ow!

What are you playing and working on right now:
I'm developing an open-source server automation framework in Ruby and have founded a company to try to make enough money to survive from it. The software is akin to cfengine but goes far beyond it in scope.  It includes a large library for managing pretty much all of the configurable elements you'd find on a Unix system (files, packages, users, cron jobs, hosts, etc.) along with support for things like transactions.  It also has an interface language I've developed for specifying configurations centrally.

In other words, I'm writing a library that can manage any aspect of a Unix system, and a new language for describing those configurations declaratively and much more simply than, say, a perl script.

What is your current screensaver, background, or wallpaper:
Black on black on black.  My Rxvt background is black, my desktop background is black but I don't notice because my Rxvts or whatever are always tiled to completely cover the screen, and my screens just fade to black when DPMS kicks in.

What's so special about your computer (room):
Hmm.  I guess the two 19" LCDs mounted on arms above my desk.  I could never go back to CRTs. (Ow! My eyes!)

How many computers do you have:
Between 7 and 11, depending on what you count as a computer. Two powerbooks, a dual athlon desktop running Debian (with 2 GB of RAM to support many VMWare images), a dual xeon running Solaris x86, a SPARC X1 running SPARC/Solaris, two old SPARCs I don't really use any more (a SPARC 20 and a dual-proc 10), plus three Linksys routers running the SveaSoft firmware and providing my wireless network.  One of them replaced my SPARC 20 as my firewall, so at least that one counts as a computer to me.

What was your first computer:
Heh, I'm a Johnny-come-lately; my first machine was an Apple Quadra 660 AV with a 500MB drive, a CD-ROM drive, and a 14.4 software modem.

Geekiest moment of your life:
Hard to say.  Maybe reading Godel, Escher, Bach in a bar on St. Patrick's Day?
 
When did you first realize you were a geek:
Well, I called it 'nerd', but I was about 9.  "Why won't anyone talk to me?  Why isn't anyone else reading?  Why do they all talk like that?  Oh well, back to Ender's Game."

Have you ever said anything geeky that someone else did not understand:
Ummmm....  Yeahhhh....  I'm not sure people ever expect to understand me any more.  Probably my most painful memory of that recently is trying to explain to my mother that disks are arranged heirarchically, like trees, and she claimed she didn't know what a tree is.

Frankly, though, just explaining what my softare startup does causes the eyes of everyone around me to glaze over, every time.  "Server automation software." <Thunk>

What is the funniest/most bizarre computer/Internet/geeky experience you have ever had:
I think the most bizarre geek experience I have, and I get this continually, is when I find another geek who is clear blinders on in certain areas.  Meeting a sysadmin who has no interest in scripting or automation just boggles my mind, but meeting anyone who would rather type something a bunch of times than let the computer do the work instead always makes me think I've landed in Bizarro world.  "Yes, we have vastly powerful computers that don't complain about doing boring work, but they're too important to waste on this task."

Trying to explain to other geeks what it's like to write a language is profoundly frustrating, but I wouldn't say it's exactly funny. Certainly they never react well when I laugh.

What is your favourite quote:
"Hanlon's Razor:  Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity."

If you were a computer program, you would be: why:
An interpreted language of some kind, preferably OO and ridiculously introspective, like Ruby. Because all of the other software basically sucks. :)

You have a time machine that can only be used once. If you use it you will not come back. What date would you set it to, and what ONE thing would you take with you (not a computer):
I wouldn't go -- I think this is just about the most interesting time in which anyone could live -- and I don't have much interest in time-shifting reality, but I suppose if I had to pick something I'd choose to send the largest herd of horses, with saddles, that I could fit, back to about 1300 on the plains of North America.  I'd need to kit them out to help the natives understand they were not for eating, but I'm guessing that would have a pretty dramatic change on what the Europeans encountered when they got here.  Probably wouldn't be a bid idea to include some nasty bugs to build up their tolerances and maybe instructions for making gunpowder and guns, but, well, they didn't have metallurgy or a written language, so...