DennisCraven
DennisCraven
Intro
Currently a Masters student at [http://www.uwo.ca The University of Western Ontario] studying distributed systems and in particular, the deployment of network testbeds on multi-node clusters.
I have been using GNU/Linux exclusively since September 8, 2001 (got the date from my /boot partition). Mandrake occupied the first 3 months, Debian/Ubuntu have the last 3, and Gentoo has the rest. Gentoo still has a place in my heart, but I think I simply outgrew the source-based distrobution method. Ubuntu offers many of the features that I enjoyed with Gentoo, in a powerful binary alternative.
Ubuntu Support Efforts
I spend much of my time on the official Ubuntu support channel as user "dcraven", and maintain various wiki pages such as the SetupNdiswrapperHowto and FixVideoResolutionHowto. I am interested in joining the MOTU team and packaging some of my own software for possible inclusion (I'm especially excited about Newton (see below)). I then would like to begin participating in the implementation of more Ubuntu specific utilities and applications. Through reading the documentation in this wiki and chatting with the folks on irc.freenode.org, I hope to aquire the information I need to become an official member of the Ubuntu community.
There is a good chance that I will be attending the [http://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuBelowZero UBZ] conference at the beginning of November 2005, so I hope to meet some of the Ubuntu team there and to get some work done 
Pet Projects
I do spend some time writing various programs and useless utilities/scripts.
My first real program of any non-trivial size that was released as GPL and actually used by other people than myself was [http://notemeister.sourceforge.net Notemeister]. Development has all but died off for this project as I had a brainfart one night and decided on creating a far more powerful (in my eyes) replacement for it called [http://newton.sourceforge.net Newton](see below).
To help with my off and on gaming addiction, I wrote (along with friend and colleague JasonGorski) a GNOME applet that can be used to keep tabs on online gaming servers and friends. Details of this project can be found a the [http://echelon-applet.sourceforge.net Echelon] home page. Although I do intend on maintaining this application as well, my main focus for a while will be on [http://newton.sourceforge.net Newton].
Most of my spare time of late is writing a personal wiki application called [http://newton.sourceforge.net Newton]. The details may be found at its [http://newton.sourceforge.net home page], but briefly, it is a [http://www.gnome.org GNOME] application that allows the user to create rich documents in a simple wiki syntax and have it rendered in HTML using the gecko engine.