The title is a take on Douglas Adams' quip in Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, when the Earth was about to be plowed under for a hyperspace bypass, and the only really intelligent species on the planet, dolphins, squeaked "Goodbye, and thanks for all the fish!" as they left for parts unknown...
1. I am a bald headed old geek fart (60+) who has been a professional software engineer for over 30 years.
2. I love music, play mandolin in a bluegrass band, and jam old time traditional music, occasionally playing for barn dances and such. I used to play jazz violin as well.
3. I've been married to the same woman for 37 years this April. She is a particle physicist with a PhD in high-energy physics from a major US university.
4. I have been awarded a US patent for innovations in adaptive system software.
5. I am a 20+ year member of the IEEE and am the chairman of an IEEE consulting network.
6. My favorite programming language is C++, but I still do a lot of C programming for Linux and Solaris kernel modules and device drivers.
7. I am a published author of technical computing articles in a number of tech-geek publications, and a chapter in a major graduate level textbook on the design and implementation of application development frameworks, a field in which I am considered an "expert". I am thinking of writing a book on system software engineering and programming.
8. I am bilingual in Spanish and English having lived and studied in Mexico for a number of years in my (misspent) youth.
9. My family (by marriage) in Oaxaca, Mexico has had a Mescal still for 4 generations. If you are into real cactus juice, this stuff's for you - 110 proof!
10. My niece and grand nieces in Mexico are actresses, and can be seen in a variety of Latino movies, TV shows, and adverts. I was teaching an advanced C++ class in Austin, Texas some years ago when my niece was starring in a Mexican soap opera, so I would go back to the hotel after class and watch her on the Spanish language channel while I would sip on a glass of the Mescal that her aunt produced... :-)
Anyway, I hope I can contribute something here that will help people advance their computer and software skills.
Addendum:
- My main workstation is an 8 core custom built system with Intel motherboard, dual E5450 Penryn processors, 8GB of ECC RAM, about 20TB of disc space including 2 external NAS arrays, dual 24" HD monitors, nVidia 8800GT video board, and a hot-swappable system drive. It currently runs Scientific Linux 6. This is backed up by a Powerware industrial strength UPS. In 3+ years, the system hasn't gone down once except for normal PM service.
- My laptop is a Dell D630 w/ 4GB RAM. Since I have two system drives for it, I run 32-bit Ubuntu 9.04 on one, and 64-bit Ubuntu Studio 10.10 on the other.
I only run Windows in virtual machines, both on the workstation and the laptop.
- My phone is a Google Nexus One running Android 2.3 (Gingerbread).
- My old Palm TX has been retired. It was a faithful companion for 5 years, and then Google gave me the Nexus One at the Linux Collaboration Summit last year. Thanks G! :-)
- My workstation kernel 2.6.32 is a custom configuration with some non-standard device drivers.
- I have a PC-104 ARM board on which I do embedded system development. It runs Debian Etch. Boot time is about 1.2 seconds unless I root the file system via NFS to the workstation, in which case it takes 4 seconds, including the NFS mount of the root file system that lives somewhere on that 20TB of disc... :-)
- System backup is to a 6TB external Sata-2 RAID-5 array, so I guess I can say that I REALLY only have about 14TB of real storage space! A lot of that storage is stuff I can reconstitute pretty easily or is just stuff that has accumulated over the years, so I don't usually back that up unless a drive starts to fail, in which case it gets backed up to the array, replaced, and written back. Had to do that this week when one of my 1.5TB Seagate drives that held client data started getting too many bad sectors. They replaced it under warranty, but what was supposed to take 2 days to get to me, took a week, so I was a bit miffed with Seagate about that.
