[Gloucs] Introduction

[Alaric Snell-Pym]

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On 15 Oct 2008, at 9:02 am, Osymandias wrote:

> As somebody else has just introduced themselves, I thought I should do
> the same.

Cor, I guess I ought to as well.

I first tried Linux out back in the early mid 90s. xdoom (which had
to run as root to get access to sound hardware IIRC) crashed in a bad
way, and when I rebooted, my partition table and my still-crucial
Windows partition were mangled! So I decided it was rubbish and I
hated it and went back to Windows for a while. I think it was
Slackware, but I'm not sure.

Then I tried a Redhat system for a while in the late 90s, and things
were a lot better (less stuff was setuid root, and less stuff
crashed). I had a computer with one of those hard drive caddies so I
could be Windows or Linux (I had this irrational fear of dual-boot
systems...), and so I called the Linux one LOVE and the Windows one
HATE. This naming convention persists to this day - 'love' is now a
cluster of servers rather than a particular server; the servers
themselves are called fear and infatuation. My sole Windows machine
is now called 'pleasure' rather than 'hate' since it exists purely to
run the Half Life 2 series, and the old 'hate' hardware has long
since been relegated to the scrap heap after a nasty power supply
failure that fried the motherboard... we assumed the CPU dead, so I
put the bare chip in the dishwasher and stuck a 'Pentium Inside' logo
onto the front of said appliance as a joke, but when a flatmate
needed a compatible chip in a hurry, we tried it and it worked fine
(despite having had several weeks of wash cycles).

Anyway, in about 1999 I tried out NetBSD on my new laptop (lust, an
AMD K6/2 400MHz with 256MB of RAM... ah, the days), and was impressed
by the simplicity and ease of use. In particular, the two-floppy net-
install setup spotted my PCMCIA interface, noticed there was an
NE2000 compatible card plugged into it, and plumbed everything
together; contemporary Linuxes at the time handled PCMCIA by running
an app in the boot sequence that probed for PCMCIA devices, assigned
them IRQs and IO ranges, then modprobed in ISA driver modules and
passed them the IRQs and port ranges on the command line, which was
all very hacky. Left to my own devices I still use NetBSD as my OS of
choice, except for a Mac laptop, but inevitably I have to use Linux a
lot for work; I worked in a FreeBSD shop from 1998 to 2001, then I
moved to a place that used Linux, and had a Debian desktop, and
looked after fifteen or so Debian servers. When I became a freelancer
I had to use Linux for a set-top box project since NetBSD didn't have
any DVB receiver driver frameworks. Now I'm the chief software
engineer for a server software company so I'm having to learn a lot
about package management, since our stuff is going to be packaged for
various distros; I've settled on CentOS as our standard internal
platform for development VMs, test servers, and infrastructure servers.

So I know lots about UNIX in general, and manage with Linux-specific
things using my extensive google-fu ;-)

I moved to Cranham, a little village just over the hill from
Gloucester, a few years ago. Being a long way from the exchange, we
can only get half megabit ADSL. Doh. The upside is that the house is
awesome.

When I have some spare time again (life has been a bit hectic lately,
partly due to having been flooded last year and it taking nearly a
year for our home to be livable again, which was particularly
thrilling for a work-from-home freelancer), I will return to my
hobbies of open source programming (see http://www.kitten-
technologies.co.uk/) and metalworking (having a strong mad scientist
urge, I like to melt things and craft them into shapes, thus
impressing my twisted will directly upon the universe). And maybe
attend some gloucslug meetings.

ABS

- --
Alaric Snell-Pym
Work: http://www.snell-systems.co.uk/
Play: http://www.snell-pym.org.uk/alaric/
Blog: http://www.snell-pym.org.uk/?author=4


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