[Story] The Human Hacking Field Guide

Hi all,

I have written an original story (a novella) titled The Human Hacking Field Guide, which tells the story of several teenagers in the vicinity of Los Angeles, California around 2005, who deal with open source software development. It was originally written in English, but there's a translation to Hebrew by me (= the author) and a translation to Literary Arabic prepared by Vieq (with some liberties taken to adapt it to the Arabic-reading audience). More translations are welcome.

Here is the abstract:

An unlikely female computer hacker (= software enthusiast, not a computer intruder)-wannabe is getting taught by an even more unlikely female computer hacker. It takes place in Los Angeles, California and is written in English.

The text and characters of the story are original, and are made available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike licence (CC-by-sa) version 3.0, along with its DocBook/XML or XML-Grammar-Fiction sources.

I will be happy if you can read it, comment upon it, build upon it, ask questions, and even pass constructive or even destructive criticism on it (see what Larry Lessig has had to say about encouraging people to badly criticise you), so I'll know how to improve it.

A final note: except for some well-known open source world celebrities that are featured in the story, and some past and present IRC nicknames from the IRC conversations, the characters in the story and the plot are fictional, and my own invention, so unfortunately you cannot meet any of the characters. It was enjoyed by several people, both grown-ups and adolescents of both genders, and I hope you can enjoy it too.

With best regards,

— Shlomi Fish

Nice to see the absence of jocks in such a story.

OK

Hi AnanthaP, thanks for your comment.

Originally Posted by AnanthaP Nice to see the absence of jocks in such a story. OK

Well, I do mention the "really cute football player" that hit on Eve after her transformation, but you're right. Part of my mission as a writer is to describe reality the way I think and hope it should be rather than the bad way I or other people conceive it be. I'm trying to be a guiding light rather than someone who "goes with the flow" and reflects the bad aspects of society. I hope that even though my idealism will probably change, I will continue to be an idealist my entire life. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertrand_Russell">Bertrand Russell</a> was arrested well into his 70s for violation of peace in a protest, well after becoming a British Lord, and this shows he was still passionate about various causes during his years as an old and more mature man, and I hope to follow suit (though attending protests and violate the peace therein is not really my style).

Thanks again for the comment, and you may enjoy reading the other stories on my site, including some aphorisms,
many fortune cookies (mostly logs of IRC conversations), some shorter “bits” (songs, fictional news items, etc.), and last but not least collections of factoids about people and things (e.g: Chuck Norris, but not exclusively).

I would also appreciate you recommending the stories you enjoyed to your friends on various online media. And finally, if you can build upon my stories in any way, (including and especially parodying them), I would appreciate that, and it would be the best compliment I can receive, as long as you naturally respect the CC-by-sa licence.

Cheers!

-- Shlomi Fish (a.k.a "Rindolf").