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I am a Geek of All Trades. CS is really my primary focus, but I've never been one to avoid knowledge in any subject. As Heinlein said, "Specialization is for insects."
The former rating reflects my normal attire. Left to my own devices, I typically wear black jeans and a black t-shirt with interesting messages on it... though if I've ever worn anything "trendy", it was by accident. The latter rating... well, how would you indicate plate armor?
I'm not entirely certain of my exact height and weight, especially the latter. I know I'm bigger than I used to be, because the armor I built in college no longer fits me, but I'm not sure exactly how much. Rough estimates put me around 6'0" and 180 pounds.
The universe began on October 12th, 1974. I intend to achieve immortality through not dying.
We got our first computer when I was three. I played ADVENT on it. I was programming BASIC when I was six. My current network setup has twenty-plus machines (depending on exactly how you count them), at two different sites (connected by FreeS/WAN VPN), running at least eight OSes (again, depending on how you count them) on four different hardware platforms. I've owned my own domain since before owning a domain was cool, and my Internet presence is entirely off my own servers.
Linux is my operating system of choice, and it runs on the majority of my computers, including my primary desktop, laptop, and all of my vital servers - every box I use on regular basis, in fact... even my stereo. I also have FreeBSD, Solaris, and Minix boxen up and running, though none of them get frequent use. I don't own an AIX box, but I worked as an AIX admin at Big Blue for the better part of two years, and it's probably second on my list as far as familiarity with its quirks goes (Linux, obviously, being first). It's dead last as far as preference, though.
IBM has described AIX as a reunification of the SysV and BSD Unix clans. I tend to agree, but add that they accomplished the merger by carefully selecting all the best features of SysV and all the best features of BSD, then throwing them out and combining what was left into a single OS. In the places where neither Unix clan had something sufficiently bad to keep, they made up their own misfeature.
I'm a fairly competent Perl programmer, and I use it where it's appropriate. It hasn't replaced either shell scripting or C for me, but it fills the gap in between quite nicely.
However, the Perl culture has some serious problems. There are far too many Perl scripters who seem to believe that "can do" is synonymous with "should do". This is exacerbated by a culture that tends to make "short" synonymous with "good", even at the expense of "readable". Contrary to popular belief, Perl does not have to look like line noise (well, except for the regular expressions... nothing much that can be done about them). Most of it does, though, and I lay the blame squarely on programmers thinking it's l33t3r to compact a page-long program into a single line consisting of nothing but punctuation. Trust me when I say, as someone who's inherited programs that were written that way (and with no comments!), it doesn't matter how l33t you are if your code makes the next guy who has to deal with it hunt you down, break into your house in the middle of the night, and hack your head off with an axe.
Remember, if TMTOWTDI, pick the legible way!
Linux, as mentioned above, is my primary operating system, and has been for more than five years. All of the machines that I commonly use run Linux. They're all single-boot, too, none of this, "Well, I dual-boot Windows, but only to play games, honest," crap. Slackware is my distro of choice, too, which may tell you something about how I like my Linux.
I'm not much of a kernel hacker, but I have contributed a small amount of kernel code... a patch for the floating-point emulation in 2.3 so that it would continue to work on FPU-less machines. My kernel testing box at that point was a 386DX-40, and as a result, I ran into a fatal bug that everyone else had apparently missed because they were developing on more modern machines.
emacs is a great OS. Pity they didn't include a decent text editor.
While we're on the subject, vi is for masochists and pico is a toy. joe is the One True Editor.
I read several Usenet groups - with an NNTP client, even, not though Google Groups - and post occasionally, mostly in alt.books.david-weber and rec.games.mecha.
I don't own a television. The last time I actually sat down and watched TV for any length of time was September 2001.