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Personal Information

About Brian Curtis

School

I'm a Graduate Student at George Mason University (GMU) in Fairfax, VA. I'm a Computational Sciences and Informatics major with a concentration in Space Sciences and Astrophysics. Since it is a computational science, I hope to eventually work on coding some MagnetoHydroDynamic Physics Models in hopes to better space weather prediction.

Programming

Being a part of a computational sciences program at the graduate level I have always had to do some type of programming. I enjoy the C language the most and I am very familiar with FORTRAN, Bash, PHP, CSS, HTML and MySQL.

Brian and Ubuntu!

I became involved with Ubuntu just after Feisty came out. It's my main OS now both at school and at home.

Get my help!

You can see me idling and helping out in #ubuntu-bugs, since I am a member of bug control I will try my best to learn from others as they help. I am always helping fellow colleagues in my workplace with Ubuntu/Linux problems as well.

Spreading

In my department I have gotten a majority of my colleagues and friends to start using the Ubuntu OS, my advisor and I maintain three network computers that are used by many people through the country as a part of his grant work. I am known through my department as "that guy you go to see if you have a linux/ubuntu problem" and have frequent visits by people who have questions about Ubuntu/Linux.

I had acquired a friend through playing the game armagetron who had constantly talked to me about how much he loved Microsoft (in specific a windows server). I constantly badgered him about how great Ubuntu is and how Bill Gates just wanted his money when finally he decided to give Ubuntu a try just to see how it compared. Now I'm quite sure that he wanted to do that just to finally get me off his back, but instead of finding ways to "fight back", he fell in love with it. All I had to teach him was a few command line items and im sure google has helped him the rest of the way. He's been running an Ubuntu server ever since and he uses it to host an armagetron server for others to play. (Note: he's taken tons of microsoft testing to get good jobs, and in a sense he's thrown a lot of that away)

I plan on starting an Ubuntu blog on blogspot and spreading my ideas and gossip about Ubuntu through that. I will include the address as soon as I think of a few things to add to it to start off with.

Community Involvement

I'm a member of http://dc.ubuntu-us.org/, BugSquad, UbuntuBugControl, among others. I have been slowly but surely keeping involved in bug triage and assisting the spread of Ubuntu. As stated above, my community is my job and my colleagues and my family and friends, and I spread Ubuntu and help all of them every chance I get.

I have brought up the idea for a team of people to go and work on testing bug patches provided by the community in bug reports that have gone untested thus far so we can push these to the developers. I hope to take this knowledge into being able to make patches myself and adopt a package.

Future Plans

I hope to start learning GTK so I can develop a system backup program using rdiff. I also found a space weather application that I would like to adopt and make a part of Ubuntu. I am in the works of figuring out how to package it correctly for Debian.

Testimonials

Brian's a regular (and helpful) soul on IRC and is organizing regular DC LoCo Bug Jams. -- KevinCole

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