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The Hacker's Diet
Notes on the Electronic Edition
by John Walker
February 11th, 1995
ABOUT THE BOOK
==============
The Hacker's Diet
-----------------
How to lose weight and hair
through stress and poor nutrition
Despite the subtitle, this book is neither a joke nor a parody; it
presents, in a unrelentingly rational way, what I learned in the
process of losing more than 70 pounds in less than six months in 1988,
and how I've managed to avoid gaining the weight back in the years
that ensued. Unlike most diet books, which present a rigid program in
a "take it or leave it" manner, "The Hacker's Diet" isn't so much a
diet program as a book about the process of losing and subsequently
controlling your weight. It provides the knowledge and techniques
you'll need to develop your *own* program for permanent weight
control--a program tailored to your lifestyle and preferences, not
those of the author.
Described within the book, and distributed with it, are a collection
of worksheets usable with Microsoft Excel which automate the tasks of
planning meals, monitoring your weight, and allow you to experiment
with the techniques described in the book to obtain a better insight
into its intellectual foundations. You don't need to use the
worksheets (or even need a computer) to apply the techniques in the
book; easy to work pencil-and-paper alternatives are given. The
worksheets are a supplement for readers who own a suitable computer
and software.
From the Preface
----------------
This is not a normal diet book, and I am not a normal diet
book author.
I'm not a doctor. Nor am I a nutritionist, psychologist,
sports hero, gourmet chef, or any of the other vocations that
seem to qualify people to tell you how to lose weight.
I'm an engineer by training, a computer programmer by
avocation, and an businessman through lack of alternatives.
From grade school in the 1950's until 1988 I was fat--anywhere
from 30 to 80 pounds overweight. This is a diet book by
somebody who spent most of his life fat.
The absurdity of my situation finally struck home in 1987.
"Look," I said to myself, "you founded one of the five biggest
software companies in the world, Autodesk. You wrote large
pieces of AutoCAD, the world standard for computer aided
design. You've made in excess of fifty million dollars
without dropping dead, going crazy, or winding up in jail.
You've succeeded at some pretty difficult things, and you
can't control your flippin' *weight*?"
Through all the years of struggling with my weight, the fad
diets, the tedious and depressing history most fat people
share, I had never, even once, approached controlling my
weight the way I'd work on any other problem: a malfunctioning
circuit, a buggy program, an ineffective department in my
company.
As an engineer, I was trained to solve problems. As a
software developer, I designed tools to help others solve
their problems. As a businessman I survived and succeeded by
managing problems. And yet, all that time, I hadn't looked at
my own health as something to be investigated, managed, and
eventually solved in the same way. I decided to do just that.
This book is a compilation of what I learned. Six months
after I decided being fat was a problem to be solved, not a
burden to be endured, I was no longer overweight. Since then,
my weight hasn't varied by more than a few pounds. I'm hungry
less often at 145 pounds than I was at 215. I look better,
feel great, and have more energy for the things I enjoy. I
spend only a few minutes a day maintaining this happy
situation. And I know I'll be able to control my weight from
now on, because I have the tools I need, the will to use them,
and the experience to know they work.
The tools are now in your hands.
Live long and prosper.
ACCESSING THE BOOK ON THE WORLD-WIDE WEB
========================================
"The Hacker's Diet" may be accessed on-line by a World-Wide Web
browser such as NCSA Mosaic. Text-only browsers may be used, but you
won't be able to see the many illustrations as you read the text. The
URL for the book is:
http://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/www/hackdiet.html
Due to the limitations the formatting one can specify in HTML, the WWW
edition of the book doesn't look as nice as the Adobe Acrobat or
PostScript versions, but all the information is there and is perfectly
usable.
READING THE BOOK WITH ADOBE ACROBAT
===================================
Users with an Adobe Acrobat reader (Windows, Macintosh, various Unix
platforms) can obtain a fully illustrated and hyperlinked copy of "The
Hacker's Diet" in the file hdpdf.zip in this directory. FTP the file
in binary mode, then use PKZIP under MS-DOS to extract the compressed
document file hackdiet.pdf. Non-DOS users may extract the file from
the archive using any decompressor compatible with PKUNZIP 2.x; the
latest version of the Unix "unzip" program supports this format.
PRINTING THE BOOK
=================
If you don't have access to either a graphical World-Wide Web browser
or an Adobe Acrobat reader, you can still print the book from the
original PostScript source or read it on-line with a PostScript
browser. This approach has some drawbacks you should be aware of.
The file is huge and time-consuming to download
-----------------------------------------------
The PostScript file for the book is in excess of 2.5 megabytes,
distributed compressed with the "gzip" utility as the file
hackdiet.ps.gz. Even in this compressed form the file is more than
700K in length. The supplementary Excel worksheets that accompany the
book are furnished as an additional gzipped "tar" archive, on the
order of a quarter megabyte in size.
The PostScript is extremely demanding on your printer
-----------------------------------------------------
Since my original intention was to simply produce camera ready copy on
a phototypesetter, I didn't spend any time simplifying the PostScript
created by the various production tools I used or worrying about
compatibility with less-than-perfect implementations of PostScript.
This document is intended to be printed on a modern laser printer with
plenty of memory and a genuine Adobe implementation of PostScript
which supports all the fonts found in the Apple LaserWriter Plus. If
you print it with this or that PostScript work-alike, you may not be
happy with the output (if, indeed, you obtain any output at all). The
book prints just fine, albeit very slowly (over two hours), on my 1987
vintage Apple LaserWriter Plus, and on every more recent Apple
LaserWriter I've tried. Ghostscript displays the book just fine
(assuming you've supplied it with the Adobe fonts used in the book).
The Sun "pageview" tool under OpenWindows on SunOS 4.1.1 also displays
the book properly on the screen, and allows you to browse through the
book in random page order. I've made every effort to minimise the
printer memory (VM) required by the document; it should print on any
Level 1 PostScript implementation, even very old ones. If you've
downloaded fonts or macros into your printer, however, they may
consume enough space to prevent the book from printing. If you
encounter problems, try turning your printer off and back on before
sending it the Hacker's Diet PostScript file. The PostScript file is
supplied in Unix end of line convention (line feed only); this is
compatible with all PostScript implementations I know of and saves
more than 40K bytes by omitting the additional carriage returns used
by MS-DOS. DOS, Macintosh, or VMS users who wish to edit the
PostScript file may have to convert it into their system's native end
of line convention first.
It's a big print job, and uses lots of paper
--------------------------------------------
When you send this file to your PostScript printer, it's going to feed
about 250 pages through the works before it's done. This is a lot of
paper (more expense), uses up a good portion of your toner cartridge,
and may well require you to clear one or more paper jams before the
whole mess is done. If you share the printer with other people,
consider also that printing the book can take *hours*, depending on
the speed of your computer's link to the printer and the speed of the
printer's PostScript engine.
NOTES ON THE EXCEL WORKSHEETS
=============================
The Excel worksheets which accompany the book (but aren't necessary to
using the weight control regime) are provided in a separate PKZIPped
archive named hdexcel.zip. When you extract this archive, you'll find
a README.DOC which explains the current software compatibility
requirements (Excel 5.0 or above under Windows 3.1 or above) of the
worksheets, and a description of each.
There are several serious incompatibilities in macro execution between
Excel 4.x and 5.0 which required changes to the weight management
macro package, WEIGHT.XLM, which are not backward compatible to 4.0.
If you're still running Excel 4.x, worksheets usable with that release
are provided in a separate gzipped Unix "tar" archive named
hdexcel4.tar.gz.