Yes, I am hopelessly immersed in computers. I have multiple machines in my bedroom that are always on even when the internet is out, and none of them run Windows. I am a strong advocate for Free Software (aka Free Speech Software) and against Microsoft. I run GNU/Linux (of the Debian flavor) and am extremely happy with it.
While at Northeastern University's College of Computer Science, I was active in the local chapter of the ACM and won us the 2003 Best Website award as the chapter's webmaster.
I am currently the senior UNIX administrator at Integrated Computer Solutions, the premier Qt training and consulting firm in North America. ICS also controls the aging Motif industry, including piloting the OpenMotif project. Subsidiary Project.net is an Open Source corporate-level project portolio management software run over the web through J2EE. I manage and administer the dozens of different architectures needed for Motif, Project.net, and our other colorful development projects, the mission-critical servers powering the Project.net Application Service, plus all of the back-end servers that make a business humm. This has given me world-class knowledge of anti-spam tools, portable Bourne shell scripting, and a plethora of other IT skills.
I have been known to help friends with client-side web programming. My ability to abuse html and css is quite extensive, just take a look at You in D&D or perhaps this fake pitch for Hindenburg Balloons (written for a class on Human/Computer Interaction). Then again, if you use the standards ignoring Internet Explorer, you won't get a good feel for my abilities because the pages will look like crap. However, I word-process in HTML and always write my code by hand. My code is good enough that I usually don't bother to validate it, but I'm more likely to do that than check it in the standards-ignorant IE.
I've been using Mozilla since about M14 or earlier (that's before they started using numbers like 0.6!). While my involvement at a Qt development firm has certainly whetted my appetite for using a Qt/webkit-powered browser, my allegiance remains to Firefox ... at least until I can wean my way off of a large number of add-ons that I have become dependent on. I've had a poorly maintained Mozilla tweaking page for quite a while, though the only thing I still maintain on it is the list of add-ons I use.
I've also written a few Greasemonkey scripts (to spruce up your browsing experience on certain sites) and Stylish styles (just like Greasemonkey, but with CSS instead of javascript).
In Spring, 2004, I taught a course on Unix, covering the basics. A previous job of mine equipped me with knowledge of a half-dozen Posix-like systems, and I've done a lot of toying in Linux, Solaris, and Cygwin. A lot of people keep asking me how to "get colors in Unix" ... this is a request that doesn't make much sense, but they usually are asking how to get colors in vim, ls, and PS1. I've created a howto page on Getting Colors in Unix (dated to 2004) to assist. You now also can glimpse my zsh prompt settings and a screenshot of my zsh prompt.
I've also become quite handy at bourne (/bin/sh) and bash scripting, and zsh has become my shell of choice. I have to handle several flavors of Posix-style systems at work (AIX, HP-UX, Solaris, IRIX, Linux, and Cygwin, no MacOSX), so most of these scripts will work almost anywhere. I have little experience on BSD-type Unix machines, so perhaps they won't work so well there. Here are a few of the scripts that seem worthwhile to share (assume they are released GPL if not otherwise stated):
watch ls -l FILE').This is a wish-list for existing programs and a number of new concepts for genres, like a first-person-shooter.
I've been creating customizations for various programs for quite a while. Sometimes this takes the form of a script, as above, or perhaps a application-specific configuration tweak, as on my mozilla page, or sometimes as a skin or theme. I have written a number of these in my time and now have a page to showcase my skins and themes. At some point in the future, this page will also include a number of backgrounds I have tweaked, mostly from hubble telescope pictures. I write such things under the name "adskinner," which has two meanings: My initials are adk, so it is really "AD, skinner," but for those of you out there who watched the X-Files, it is also FBI Assistant Director Skinner, "AD Skinner."
I liked this story of a "Real Programmer" so much that I decided to mirror it. This is a little piece of history whose meaning is bound to be forgotten. It makes for a good read for any person not afraid of computers. (An average understanding of what makes a computer program and what binary code is would help but is unnecessary).
All content copyright © 2003-08 by Adam Katz unless otherwise noted. All rights reserved. Page last updated Wed Dec 10 18:48:58 2008.