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About This Month's Authors
Not Linux

About This Month's Authors

Marius Andreiana

Marius is 19 years old, and a student in the first year at Politehnica Bucharest, Romania. Besides Linux, he also loves music (from rock to dance), dancing, having fun, spending time with friends. He is interested also in science in general (and that quantum spooky connection :) and says, "I like cooking (okay, maybe I don't like it a lot, but I have to cook because I live alone while I'm at studies in Bucharest. Poor me :-) poor neighbours :-)"

Shane Collinge

Part computer programmer, part cartoonist, part Mars Bar. At night, he runs around in a pair of colorful tights fighting criminals. During the day... well, he just runs around. He eats when he's hungry and sleeps when he's sleepy.

Ray Ferrari

I am a new linux enthusiast who has been following the trend for over a year now. I have successfully installed Debian and participate in helping bring Linux to more people. I have been working with computers for seven years on my own, learning as much as possible. I currently am looking for a sales position within the Linux community. Talks are under way with VALinux; my dream company. I have been a volunteer for both Debian and LPI.

Sven Guckes

Sven, born in 1967, lives and studies mathematics and computer science in Berlin, Germany, He supports the development of text based programs which are freely available (OpenSource), highly customizable, available on all platforms, and well supported. He also comments all his setup files with lots of examples and makes available them available as "webpages". His favourite programs as of today are: irc (sirc), lynx+w3m, (elm) mutt, slrn (nn, gnus), (tcsh) zsh. He is the maintainer of the webpages on slrn.org and vim.org. For more info see http://go.to/guckes or write to .

Sean Lamb

I am a computer science major and LAN Admin at Lakeland College's Madison, WI, campus as well as a member of the Wisconsin DOT Help Desk and Server Backup teams. My previous Linux experience was solely with RedHat until installing Caldera 2.2. I am a member of MadLUG (the Madison Linux User Group, at http://madlug.jvlnet.com) and an active contributor to the user group's web presence. When I'm not playing with Linux, I'm building and running my model railroad. I can be reached at .

Mark Nielsen

Mark founded The Computer Underground, Inc. in June of 1998. Since then, he has been working on Linux solutions for his customers ranging from custom computer hardware sales to programming and networking. Mark specializes in Perl, SQL, and HTML programming along with Beowulf clusters. Mark believes in the concept of contributing back to the Linux community which helped to start his company. Mark and his employees are always looking for exciting projects to do.

Krassimir Petrov

Krassimir has a PhD in Agricultural Economics from Ohio State University. He also has an MA in Economics and a BA in Business (Finance, Accounting, Management).

JC Pollman and Bill Mote

JC has been playing with Linux since kernel 1.0.59. He spend way too much time at the keyboard and even let his day job - the military - interfere once in a while. His biggest concern about linux is the lack of documentation for the intermediate user. There is already too much beginner's stuff, and the professional material is often beyond the new enthusiast.

Bill is the Technical Support Services manager for a multi-billion dollar publishing company and is responsible for providing 1st and 2nd level support services to their 500+ road-warrior sales force as well as their 3,500 workstation and laptop users. He was introduced to Linux by a good friend in 1996 and thought Slackware was the end-all-be-all of the OS world ... until he found Mandrake in early 1999. Since then he's used his documentation skills to help those new to Linux find their way.

James Rogers

James Rogers is a systems programmer specializing in the area of Cloverleaf HL7 routers. He is also currently working on an open source library of HL7 routines. He hopes to use this library to write an open source HL7 interface engine.

Anderson Silva

Anderson is a Senior at Liberty University majoring in Computer Science. Originally from Brazil, he works at Whetstone Logic, Inc. as an Online Application Developer. He is also a member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the Lynchburg Linux User Group in Lynchburg, Virginia.

Not Linux

In late January, I went to the 8th International Python conference in Arlington, VA, and attended the Zope track. I have been a Python enthusiast for several years, and have recently gotten excited about Zope, which is a web application server. I came back with a year's worth of projects in my head, and zopified my personal sites (mso.oz.net) last weekend. Now comes the harder part: actually writing applications for this platform, especially since parts of Zope are still in an alpha stage and are changing rapidly.

Eventually, the Gazette itself may migrate to a more interactive environment like Zope. However, because the Gazette's unique distribution network depends on it being implemented in simple HTML which can be viewed anywhere (including off-line), we will think long and hard before making any major changes which may limit its accessibility.

The folks who brought you the WTO protests are at it again with a plan to Shut Down Microsoft. There will be a street theater action February 7th at 7:15am. (Ugh, so early in the morning.) If you will be in the Seattle area and want more information on this, contact Direct Action Network at 206-632-1656 or 206-632-9482. I will try to have a report in next month's Gazette on how it turns out. (Does this remind anybody of the Silicon Valley Tea Party, when Linux enthusiasts crashed the housewarming party for a Microsoft developer support center in Palo Alto, CA, in 1998? Of course, the upcoming event will not be focused specifically on Linux.)

Thanks to all our authors, not just the ones above, but also those who wrote giving us their tips and tricks and making suggestions. Thanks also to our new mirror sites.

Have fun!

Michael Orr
Editor, Linux Gazette,