This story is long, and boring, but don’t worry, it also works as a sedative. So, relax, and read the story of this site, and I, while we slowly chew through your cortex.
About myself:
I’ve been on the internet, in one form, or another, since 1992, predating the “World Wide Web,” which many people consider to be “The Internet.” It was a great place. There was so much more technical banter, which was all free – you were either on a university, or dialing into one. Commercial prospects had yet to develop.
Professionally, I am a computer polyglot. I speak Linux distributions, BSD derivatives, Windows, MacOS X, and even “nearly dead” operating systems such as Solaris, MS-DOS, AmigaDOS, and NeXTStep (3.3, OpenStep 4.2).
Yep. I can even put a scientist to sleep. However, I only pull out the big guns when I’m bored, myself., and don’t care to be invited back to the party. This almost never happens; nobody invites me to parties. Well, not anymore..
I’m still at least 50% more affable than Wikipedia, and rarely do I have people racing to make changes to the way I think – unless there’s an election..
About this site:
Initially, I obtained this domain for email in 1996ish, being that there was nobody else who wanted such a difficult-to-type domain. Being a programmer, and an administrator, I figured I might eventually use it as a form of self promotion (this site was a single page until nearly 2000).
Initially, I used it primarily for testing and posting utilities useful to myself and other UNIX using folks, distributing my personal release of FreeBSD 3.5.1 (which contained updates for NETGRAPH, encryption, IPF, and several other kernel enhancements from the FreeBSD 4.x kernel tree) for use as a Turn-Key router/firewall/MTA/HTTP/Proxy/Scanner solution, until I discontinued it in 2001. Thats when my $25 Compaq Pentium-based machine completely broke, giving me no ISA ports to keep Adaptec 16MB-bounce-run card going – and no reason to keep an awful Reaktek 8192 going any longer.
Then, I turned to PHP. Starting with the proverbial “Hello World.”, I designed this site from the ground up around a small little CMS core in 2001 that I refined, added features like “BlogTags” before there was a term for “cloud tags”, “iTuned In”, which would display what I was listening to realtime. Basically, just lots of worthless little toys all integrated until I finally opted to jettison in 2005 for the sake of sanity. Little did I know that would become the norm.
With the advent of Mac OS X, I moved to the PowerPC platform, and began porting loved UNIX utilities to the Mac, starting with the infamous XV image manipulation program, and exiting with MacOS X support for DOSBox.
Through March 2006, I offered these programs I created, as well as the software I “made work on Mac.” Sadly, my free time no longer affords this luxury. The PPC platform is dead, and PPC utilities, even more so. Thus, my site returning to the haphazardly-updated blog phenomenon. I still do PHP when work calls for it, but haven’t seen a PPC platform in years. I’ll be honest – Sparc (various), PPC, x86, x86_64, ARM – doesn’t matter anymore unless we’re talking about the speed of execution – or whatever the job calls for.