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About Me

I am a 33-year-old father of two, Connagh (6) and Callum (3), married to Michelle. Currently living and working in Derby, with a view to moving to South Africa at some point in the hopefully-not-too-distant future. I am a Java programmer by trade, but I also do some freelance web consultancy work using Free Software (Bluefish, Eclipse, Apache, PHP, MySQL) and maintain a network of computers at home. I have also been known to write C/C++, a little Perl and Python.

I started using Slackware Linux (Slackware '96) on an old 486 I got from a skip while I was still at Middlesex University back in 1997, wanting a free Unix-based OS on which to develop a MUD. Eventually it found its way onto my "proper" computer, which went through several hardware upgrades and after serving as my external web/mail/DNS server has now been retired. Upon joining South Derbyshire LUG, I was convinced of the merits of switching to Debian to help reduce the burden of maintaining my machines, in spite of its reputation as a hacker's distribution, and installed it on both my external server and my intranet server. Both have since been migrated to Ubuntu - Hardy on the external server and Intrepid on the intranet server.

I first installed Ubuntu Breezy on my wife's desktop after getting frustrated with Red Hat and being impressed with the package management in Debian, but wanting a distribution oriented towards "normal" users. This machine has also been retired and replaced with an Asus EeePC 701, currently running Hardy. In February 2006 I bought an Acer Ferrari 4005WLMi and installed Breezy AMD64 on that, then later edited my /etc/apt/sources.list to follow the changes to Dapper, before following the prescribed process for upgrading to Edgy, Feisty, Gutsy, Hardy, Intrepid and Jaunty. I managed to trash my hard drive with a misplaced dd command, and repartitioned my drive to install the stable Jaunty and Karmic alpha 3 to ecryptfs-protected roots, with shared home and boot partitions. The Karmic installation has now been upgraded to Lucid. I also have an Asus EeePC 904 running Lucid.

Ubuntu Contributions

• Some testing on the Acer Ferrari 4005WLMi (including off-list discussion with a couple of other users, Lakin Wecker and Stefano Rivera).

• Contributions to several bugs (65159, 53216, 69872, 46771, 66900, 90709, 47971, 93413).

• A member of the UK LoCo team and Launchpad Beta Testers team.

• Some advocacy work -- burning Dapper CDs and handing them out to friends and associates.
• Somewhat active on IRC (#ubuntu-uk) and UK Team mailing list.
• Wrote to my MP about EDM179. Unfortunately, my MP is Margaret Beckett, Foreign Secretary, and cannot sign EDMs. She did, however, forward my letter on to Alan Johnson, Secretary of State for Education and Skills, who replied with a stock response.

• I have created the Hedera project to allow synchronisation of a local Thunderbird address book with CouchDB.

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