Scot Hacker

Scot Hacker is a former technology writer living in California. He is currently employed as webmaster at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, where he also builds publishing systems for journalism students, runs webcasting operations, and co-teaches multimedia skills courses. He also manages a small web development and hosting company, [http://hosting.birdhouse.org Birdhouse Hosting] , and maintains a near-daily blog called [http://birdhouse.org/blog Scot Hacker's Foobar Blog] that covers technology, journalism, academia, and life in California with his wife and son.

Scot is the author of "MP3: The Definitive Guide" [cite book|title=MP3: The Definitive Guide|year=2000|id=ISBN 1-565-92661-7|publisher=O'Reilly Media] (the
O'Reilly "hermit crab" book) and "The BeOS Bible", [cite book|title=BeOS Bible|year=1999|id=ISBN 0-201-35377-6|publisher=Peachpit Press] the definitive power-user's guide to the now-defunct BeOS. Both books are currently out of print. He has also served as a columnist for PC Magazine, Byte, MacWorld and ZDNet.

Hacker is also the founder and administrator of [http://kissthisguy.com/ The Archive of Misheard Lyrics] (the domain, kissthisguy.com, is lifted from the oft-misheard Jimi Hendrix "Purple Haze" lyric, "Excuse me while I kiss the sky") as well as [http://betips.net The BeOS Tip Server] , a repository of power-user tips similar to [http://macosxhints.com macosxhints.com] .

Hacker is the author of numerous scripts and applications, both for BeOS and for Linux sysadmins. His BeOS scripts include RipEnc, a menu-driven MP3 ripping frontend written in bash, and TrackerBase, which facilitated the publishing of dynamic websites using the database-like Be File System as the backend. The BeOS Tip Server website was initially hosted on a BeOS machine powered by TrackerBase and BeOS' built-in PoorMan web server, which was later swapped out for RobinHood. The site has since moved to a more sustainable hosting environment, Apache, PHP, and MySQL running on Ubuntu Linux (LAMP). Hacker's scripts for sysadmins include [http://birdhouse.org/software/reducer.txt Reducer] , which scans blogs for spammy IPs and adds them to a system firewall, [http://birdhouse.org/software/wp-digest/ WP-Digest] , which sends out email summaries of content in WordPress blogs, and [http://birdhouse.org/software/vimreaper.txt The Vim Reaper] , which kills off abandoned vim process which hog major CPU on some systems.

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