About the author

Who is that masked programmer!?!?

The dude who owns this site has been developing software for over 45 years and is still passionate about it.

He has worked professionally in Australia, Germany and Italy and for many years in each. It should come as no surprise that he speaks, reads and writes English, German and Italian.

Off the top of his head, the sorts of technology he has worked on or developed include:

Embedded systems, hardware development, virtualisation (QEMU/KVM, VMware ESX/vSphere, AWS, Linode), GPS/navigation, databases (PostgreSQL, mySQL), device drivers, Unix/Linux, Windows, CP/M (that's OLD!), POSIX, X11, networking (NETBIOS, TCP/IP, uucp (also old)), Nagios, LDAP, Kerberos, NFS, SMB/CIFS, HTTP, flex, bison, ceph, sendmail, Postfix, cloud stuff.

Also off the top of his head, the sorts of projects he has developed include:

Communications generally, microprocessor emulators, logistics, factory automation and industrial control, authentication systems, games, web site development, network file systems, distributed systems, highly-available systems, network traffic analysers, email, secure networking for financial institutions, ship-to-shore telephone systems.

A programming language to avoid. Apparently it doesn't allow comments and only allows variable names to be one letter long thus precluding meaningful variable names

The programming languages he is or has been proficient in include (in no particular order):

C, ADA, Pascal, PL/1, Fortran, Cobol, Forth, Assembler (multiple flavours - 2650, 6502, 8051, 8080, z80, 8086, 80386, IBM 360), Tcl, HTML, Java, Python, PHP, APL, bash, awk, sed, BASIC (who uses BASIC any more?).

He has done development in the world where TTL, CMOS, V^ss, μF and ohms make sense.

He runs a number of web sites, likes Mediawiki a lot, tolerably manages Drupal, has developed Moodle courses, is proficient in HTML, adequate with CSS and has heard of HTML 5.

He has worked probably about equal amounts in the commercial world and the education sector (university).

He has a special interest in security (vague statement, but he's trying to be concise) and optimisation.

He has two airplane pilot licenses (because one is never enough!) and is a Maestro di Scherma (an Italian qualification which translates to "Master of Fencing", i.e., the Olympic sport). He has been known to enjoy rock-climbing… if traipsing through the bush, banging one's knees, scraping one's knuckles and dangling from impossibly high places can be called enjoyment.

If you want to contact him, here is his email address: