Comments on: What’s your geek quotient?

By: Joseph A Nagy, Jr

Joseph A Nagy, Jr — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 01:52:45 +0000

I’d have to grab my notes, but I’m sure your right. Still, if I recall correctly, I had no problems with binary-to-decimal and the reverse.

By: Chip Camden

Chip Camden — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 00:17:34 +0000

Well, with binary to hex, for instance, you just group the bits by fours and translate 0-F for each. Binary to octal, you use groups of three bits instead. When going from binary to decimal, you have to add the powers of two.

By: Chip Camden

Chip Camden — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 00:15:00 +0000

Looking forward to hearing about it, Joseph.

By: Joseph A Nagy, Jr

Joseph A Nagy, Jr — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 22:02:54 +0000

I don’t remember going from binary to decimal that hard. Anything to hex, now that was tough.

By: Joseph A Nagy, Jr

Joseph A Nagy, Jr — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 22:01:23 +0000

so much I want to do, so little time. I have an idea I want to share with you for your input on it, Sterling. Catch ya on IM

By: Chip Camden

Chip Camden — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 15:46:09 +0000

Well, Wayne, geekiness is often characterized by intense specialization. So a person may be an uber-geek in one domain, but clueless in another. What’s your geek specialty?

By: Chip Camden

Chip Camden — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 15:44:16 +0000

Binary, octal, and hex are fairly easy to interchange — being al based on powers of two. Decimal is the tough one.

By: Chip Camden

Chip Camden — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 15:42:37 +0000

Cool! Character set design is its own geeky domain. I used to be pretty good at raster fonts, but I never learned how to construct TrueType or OpenType fonts.

Switching from binary straight to decimal is a pretty good talent. I always get there via hex these days (though I used to go through octal).

By: Chip Camden

Chip Camden — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 15:39:02 +0000

Yeah, that’s geeky in its own dimension. And what is the essence of geekiness, after all, if not an obsession with some specific technology or discipline?

By: Wayne

Wayne — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 13:42:41 +0000

I’m worried. 3/4 of that article was over my head. I may have to turn in my Geek card in shame.

By: Joseph A Nagy, Jr

Joseph A Nagy, Jr — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 11:41:20 +0000

I actually used to know how to convert between octal, hex, decimal and binary for my Electronics Engineering course. That was always fun.

By: Sheamus

Sheamus — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 08:46:58 +0000

When I was about 13 and an avid Sinclair ZX Spectrum BASIC programmer, I used to spend a LOT of time designing little graphics across the character set. These were limited to the Spectrum’s 8×8 character maps, which were coded in binary, like this (for the letter ‘A’)

00000000
00111100
01100110
01100110
01111110
01100110
01100110
00000000

You could input this either way – in binary or decimal – but I used to think in *both* at the same time, I did it so much. It got to a point where I was always going around thinking in code, and whenever I’d see any kind of image, I’d try and break it down into little 8X8 sets. After a while I taught myself to do it frighteningly quickly.

Looking back now, I’m pretty sure I was the inspiration for The Matrix.