He also created strobe, an early port scanner, under the handle of proff.
Many people tend to forget what a small world the internet was at that time and hackers (white/black/other hat) that tended to be productive in one area were often productive in many others.
For a while there I was getting emails about open-source related conferences organized by a guy named "Hans Reiser". After the infamous Hans Reiser was in jail. It was a bit creepy, and I felt a bit sorry for him (the non-infamous Hans just trying to organize conferences, not the infamous one who murdered his wife).
EDIT: Speaking of which, Wikipedia seems to think he may be eligible for parole in a week or so. O_o
I sympathize with the whole "why should I change, he's the one that sucks" attitude, but having the same name as a famous murderer is probably a good opportunity to adopt a 'stage name' for professional use, if not get it legally changed.
I understand 'Hans' is related to 'Johannes' and is sometimes anglicized to 'John' (I believe one of my great grandfathers did this.) One of the nice things about the name 'John' is you can change it in various ways without anybody thinking it unusual; e.g. a 'John' can also call themselves 'Jack' and nobody thinks that unusual.
I thought it was a British thing. As an American, I’ve never met a John going by Jack (at least, I don’t think I have).
On the other hand, C.S. Lewis apparently went by Jack, which isn’t a common nickname for Clive or Staples. But people generally don’t argue over nicknames. And they may not even realize a nickname actually is a nickname; it’s not common for people to ask for your legal ID, after all.
People still talk about Jack Kennedy, the assassinated US president.
Apparently Jack is a generic name, too, for any small boy. So inns would employ a boot-Jack to help guests get their boots off, later supplanted by a gadget.
And not just in America. It's common in Australia too, and apparently it dates back a long way in England. Jack has become a lot more common as an actual given name over the past few decades, though.
That reminds me of William Hitler, nephew of Adolf, who was born in the UK and fought with the Americans in WWII. Led to some interesting conversations.
"What's your name, son?"
"Hitler."
"Howdy, Hitler, you ready to help us fight Hitler?"
These are commits from the "dark ages" and doesn't mean he didn't test his code locally. The "public" TDD culture didn't really surface until Kent Beck et-al published their TDD manifestos in the early 2000's.
Testing did not spring forth as a concept from Kent Beck’s head: it was widely expected in, for example, Perl code on CPAN in the mid to late 90s and that was far from unique. The tools were worse or mostly paid for some languages (e.g. C) so there was more variation and justifications for not doing it.
Has it really been long enough that this is no longer common knowledge? Before it was "wikileaks founder was open source contributor", it was "open source name has wiki thing for document leaks".
Of course that all happened in the long long ago so there is no reason to dwell on it. It's not like every news story that has been trying to craft a hack narrative to explain Assange's actions and motivations to the public has fallen short of slashdot comments circa 2005.
There's no reason to know anything about the past. Back then we developed everything in COBOL using Waterfall because no big brains were around to coin the word "agile" yet and save us from ourselves. And subversion server side hooks didn't even exist because nobody had coined the phrase "continuous deployment" yet. Dark times indeed.
Many people tend to forget what a small world the internet was at that time and hackers (white/black/other hat) that tended to be productive in one area were often productive in many others.