l33t h4xx0r

Because of my usual circle of friends I sometimes forget that the world is still largely populated by people who regard computers as magical artifacts of a most mysterious nature.

This was demonstrated recently when I was at a clients site. Everyone in this company is really Not Technical.

They were having a problem with their web site that they just couldn’t solve with all of the pointy-clicky software that they use. I reached for the nearest Mac, opened a terminal window, logged on to the web server and started typing Unix commands to diagnose and fix the problem.

“Hey look”, said the person whose computer I was using, “Dave’s doing that hacker thing”.

It seems that in their view of the world, anyone who can use a command line must be a hacker. And, of course, they mean “hacker” in the corrupted current media meaning, not the real meaning (which would have been a compliment).