A Forum

A Forum is like a minimal version of your society - there are polite people, there are rude people, there are intelligent people, there are the fools, there are people who call the shots, then there are the kind ones that whisper a word of advice or encouragement, when everyone seems to be too bent on pushing you towards the ground; and yes, there are heroes as there are villains.

These being said, a forum can be a nice place to hang around, a good place to learn, and the best place to meet up people who are like-minded and believe in the same things that you do. Joining a forum is like walking into a large party, where everyone is a stranger to you. You have to learn to chat up with new people, and also learn to make some sense.

Some forums are relatively friendlier to new people (noobs, as we like to call them), and are forgiving of all the nonsense that is associated with them. I am not suggesting here that new people are all fools or that all noobs are agents of nonsense - but I have been to quiet a number of forums, and that is usually the case. So, it would be wise on your part to distinguish yourself from the rest, and prove to the other people that you are worthy of their time.

Another thing to do is to try and be polite to everyone, irrespective of whether they are polite to you or not. If two short-tempered people get in on an argument on a forum, it inevitably turns into what poeple call a flame war. And believe me, it is not a pretty sight. Flame wars on forums are what gang fights are at bars - both usually end with people taking sides, and both sides fighting till they forget what they are fighting for, in the first place.

Try to read up on whatever you are going to post. And don't speak unless you are absolutely sure of what you are saying. Failure to comply will make you look like a fool :P Also have in mind that the question that you are going to ask has already been asked and answered twice over, in a couple of hundred forums across the internet. If you can find it in Google, you have no business asking it in a forum.

You may think that gaining the favor of the forum's administrators or moderators may work in your favor. You will never have been more wrong in your life. People who try to flatter admins and mods are loathed by other members of the community. Try not to be that guy who agrees with whatever the admin says, and has no opinion of his own.

If every single person on a forum calls you a jerk, then that probably means that you are one. Try to change your attitude. Go over posts and personal messages again, and try to think of what went wrong, and where. Beware. Forums treat jerks the way teachers treat students with incomplete homework - they kick you out :P

Finding Time

It is being difficult these days to find some time to spend on coding or hacking. I am almost always away at school, and even when I go back home, I usually have my hands full.

ESR wasn't drunk when he wrote "..being something of a social outcast helps. [Because] It allows you to spend your time on more useful things like hacking..."

I have seriously considered buying a laptop, and coding away at college too. But I am not in a position right now to do that.

And lastly, I have to stop making these kinds of lazy, half-baked posts in my blog, and do some quality writing.

When I look back and see what I have done in the past few weeks, one thing is clear: I have been wasting my time. I have not made a single full webpage as yet (in the past few weeks). I am constantly saying to myself "There is soooo much to do, and sooo little time!".

I am hoping this will clear out soon, and I'll be able to manage my time better.

Hacking

Hacking. I have always been fascinated by it. Intrigued. Possessed, even. For it is so amazing to think and feel like a hacker, that there was a time in my life when I wished I could give anything to be known as a hacker.

The first impression of a hacker I formed in my mind, was that of a cunning individual sitting in a dark room tapping away on his workstation. I certainly imagined that person to be evil - a notorious individual who broke into computer systems and stole important data. And I knew even then that it was a crime. And I knew that these kind of people went to prison often.

The idea of prison was not very fascinating to me, but the urge to possess that power - the power to create and to destroy -  was so overwhelming, that I began browsing the internet about hacking and how to go about it. As of today, I consider the majority of what I found and learned as useless. Yes I learned how to change windows passwords and how to format hard drives, but I had no idea how these happened. I was able to do a lot of things, but I couldn't do anything.

But it was all before an article that I read changed my mind. It didn't just change my mind - it altered my idea of hacking, and that of a hacker, forever. I believe that it is the best place to start if you are planning on learning hacking. This wonderful piece is by ESR (Eric S. Raymond). His homepage is here and the article titled "How To Become A Hacker" lives here. As a total novice, and at a loss as to where to start, this article got me started.

I also joined a couple of sites, and a forum at a later point of time. Searching on Google for "learn to hack" will pop up some interesting options. I joined HackThisSite.org. They are a legal training ground, and they had various missions to get me started. It was while attempting to solve those missions that I came to know how far behind I was in my expertise. Expertise? Well, I was not even close.

The forum I joined was HackForums.net. And on retrospect, I would advice you not to join it. The forum is great, and there might even be some pretty useful stuff there, but the people! Most of the users on HF (short for HackForums) are kids looking for a way to vent out their frustration on the world. Too often in the threads, you can see them whining for people to take down a particular site. And I wasn't surprised to find many questions like "How to hack this guy's facebook password?" and the like.

And the icing on the cake is that this forum has a section called "Requests for Hacking". I mean, come on! You miss the whole spirit and essence of hacking if you are asking other people to do it for you, in the first place.

I might get a little philosophical here, but here goes: Hacking is like life. It is the journey, and not the destination that matters here. You live life for the sake of living it, an not because you are going to get somewhere after your life is over. It is the same for hacking. You hack because you love it, because you can learn something from it, because it fascinates you - not because you take a thrill out of harming people and defacing their sites!

I have always wanted to write open-source software and be a known member of the hacker community. But I have not yet acquired the skills. All I know now are the basics. I guess I'm more of a Jack-of-all-trades rather than the master of one. I have frequently heard people advice others to take it one at a time. But I have never been able to have the focus required to do so. I keep jumping from pillar to post when I see something that arouses my interest. For example, if I found a post somewhere about how to make a low-cost line-following robot, I would probably drop whatever I was doing and go for it. And if I were working on a site exercise that I had given myself in PHP, and I see a new way to program an android app with HTML5 and Javascript, I would certainly drop the site and go after the app. I have tried in the past to correct this habit of mine, but in vain. I guess that is something that I'll have to learn to live with.

If you have read the hacker-howto, you would now know about the glider. I hope that some day, I will consider myself worthy enough to use it.

EDIT
(10 Aug 2013)
I posted a thread on HF, explaining what I wanted from the site and what I was getting instead. I asked the people if it was best for me to leave, or to stay and wait a little longer. I have got a total of 22 replies when writing this, and I am convinced that I should stay a while, and explore the 'Coding' sections. I would advice that you try HF, but ignore the things that do not interest you. If you are someone like me, you would like the 'Coding' section a lot :)

Who?

So, who am I? And what in God's name is rktcool?

Well, it depends a lot on who you ask.

I like to think of rktcool as an online persona who lives in the internet and likes to hack and code.

Back when I was 16 (which was about a couple of years ago), my strongest feeling about the Internet was fear. Yes, fear. I didn't have access to an internet connection at home until I was almost 16. And when I did, the people around me made sure that I was up to date about what could possibly happen on the Internet, if I weren't careful.

Every other day, I was reminded about about some innocent guy who had lost his money on one of the numerous scams on the Internet. And that was when rktcool was born. I wanted to have a pretty good presence online, but I didn't want to disclose my identity to the whole wide world.

The name though, was derived from a movie I saw at that time. It featured a young lady who used the name "rocket girl" in an online chat room. I don't exactly remember the name or the story of the movie, but it was a pretty good watch at that time.

And so, I wanted to be rocketboy originally, but I couldn't get that username on Gmail. I tried rocketcool, but I think that was unavailable too. So, I went with rktcool, and I've not thought about changing my identity since. Well, I did a few times. But the simplicity of this name held me like a charm.

If you are a frequent user of Omegle or Kik, you would have probably heard of me. We might even have chatted a couple of times. There was a time when Omegle was a craze to me, and when I came to know about Kik, it fascinated me. I believe Omegle and Kik have one thing in common - simplicity. At least they did, back then. I am not so sure that they do now.

And talking of Kik, that is where I learned that a good password is worth its weight in gold. My Kik was hacked - twice. And as a very infrequent user, I didn't notice until late that I had lost a few good friends and a lot of good reputation. The guy who cracked me struck up not-so-cultured conversations with a lot of people. Curse my luck!

Back then, I didn't know a thing about coding, building software or building websites. I spent most of my time (when I was 14 to 16) browsing the web, staying on useless (as I later came to realise) chat rooms, and making friends online (which I must say, is not that bad).

But it has been a long way since then - I became interested in computers (in general) and programming (in particular), learned some HTML, kept the fire alive, learned some C/C++, came to be recognized as a good programmer at school (which I'll admit, is next to nothing - no one was interested in computers there, and you were the best if you could print "Hello World!" a 100 times using a for loop), got familiar with basic SQL statements, dived into the wonderful world of PHP, stumbled upon Android and got tangled up in electronics and robotics.

Whew! Yeah, I know. That is quiet a list if you have not met a lot of pros online. But I have seen some people around the Web who can make that list look the size of a mustard. So, I am forever learning, and I am hoping that I'll be good enough some day to deserve a mention from you :-)

Around the start of 2013, I also became interested in hacking. Hacking as in "hacked up a good tool for tidying my database" and NOT as in "hacked my friend's facebook account". Yes, the word hacking is interpreted differently from its original meaning these days (thanks to some really stupid crackers) which is plainly disgusting. I will save that for another post, and another day.

So, this is me! This is rktcool.