Metafarce - Articles by Andrew McConachie

Introducing Hexcap

Sat 11 January 2014 By Andrew McConachie

This week I put together a website and released version 0.1 of Hexcap, a project I have been working on for a few months in my spare time. Hexcap is an interactive hex editor for libpcap files. My goals with Hexcap are to create a general purpose packet editor …
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A Master Orientational Metaphor for Computers and Software(Part I)

Mon 10 August 2009 By Andrew McConachie

The purpose of this article is to introduce my views and theories regarding general orientational metaphors and their influence over our understanding of computers. Since the English language dominates computer discourse and most machine languages are written from an English perspective special attention is given to orientational metaphors derived from …
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Understanding Computers

Thu 06 August 2009 By Andrew McConachie

My own journey and interest in computers and metaphors began around my time as an undergraduate. I was working at the campus bookstore of my university and dealing every day with customers and their broken personal computers. I was well versed in fixing computers since I had been breaking, fixing …
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Some Thoughts on Network Neutrality

Wed 05 August 2009 By Andrew McConachie

There is a new debate brewing over net neutrality and I thought it time I offered up some of my opinions on this subject. As both a consumer of ISP services and a frequent consultant to ISPs I can hopefully provide a nuanced perspective on this debate. My experience is …
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The Fallacy of Direct Communication(Part II)

Sun 31 May 2009 By Andrew McConachie

Part I

In (Part I) I introduced the concept of direct communication and gave a definition for it based on the dictionary definition of the adjective direct. I then showed how this definition of direct communication implies the use of the conduit metaphor. I will now discuss some of the …
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