[Wolves] New Guy Woo

[Andy Wootton]

(What, you have to use the same mail address alias that you registered?)

Hi to everyone I met last night and to those who just don't like curry.

I mentioned my background on VMS (but was spared.) I was a programmer 
then system manager including 5 years as a contractor. I joined Powergen 
11 years ago to run their 24/7 OpenVMS clusters used for energy trading. 
Soon after that I saw the writing on the wall that serial mismanagement 
by DEC, Compaq & HP was not going to have a happy ending for OpenVMS and 
thought it was time I learned something about Unix.

I had a DECUS half-inch tape with some Gnu tools including GCC on it in 
1982.I ran Minix on a twin floppy Amstrad portable before upgrading to 
Lasermoon's Linux-FT with SWim/Motif on a 486/33 with 8MB in 1995. I 
don't like to rush.

I am now Information Security Officer in the Energy Wholesale department 
(which is not the part of the organisation made famous by 'The 
Register'!) My role is almost non-technical. Well, we couldn't have 
that. I don't think that word processors are an appropriate tool for 
managing large chunks of documentation so I am building our security 
policy framework on Docbook XML components and publishing PDFs. I'm 
'developing' on Fedora Core 1. This is the first time I have ever been 
paid for working on Unix. I should be using Win XP and Documentum but 
neither seem to work properly. If anyone knows a stable, easy, graphical 
editor for Docbook XML that normal people could use then please let me 
know about it.

I appreciate Unix philosophy but really miss OpenVMS editors and the 
consistency of its command line options. I used vi for a while before 
discovering that emacs has a better mode for Docbook though I find them 
both as friendly as a rat trapped in a corner and switching hasn't 
helped with the learning process. I use Gnome because its prettier.

There are more questions than answers,
Woo