ben soo

i am a computer geek.  i grew up doing other kinds of geeky stuff in The Land Before Computers, but once silicon chips entered my life the adaptation was swift and complete.  That i grew up with other interests makes me a somewhat anomalous and inefficient computer guy: i'm fairly dry but i don't really cut.  These other interests were (and remain) for the most part in the arts; photos and writing.

In the computer world i've further specialized to being a Linux geek; the first version i installed was probably 0.96 or thereabouts.  It's been one of those projects for which i could never really find the time to do well, and everything i know about it i've figured out on the fly, as something i had to get working before proceeding on to fixing something really important.

So, over time i've accumulated gibberish to a point where i don't actually know anything about anything, but can usually fake it if i bang on the keyboard for long enough.

The things i know nothing about that are proving to be valuable for this project include; Courier MTA, BIND, Sendmail, Apache, dSpam, Shorewall and, of course, Drupal.  Am trying to know next to nothing about PHP on the fly.

i have in the past worked at various journals and periodicals, have done some writing both fiction and nonfiction, and have shot film.  This last really dates me.

Other things that date me are the computer things for which i've totally forgotten i know nothing about.  The INN news server in the days when it was largely Rich Salz's code,  BIND 4,  Sendmail 8.1, NCSA httpd, QNX 4.

There're boatloads of other things i've forgotten the names of, like SLIP and PPPd, which went with being the techy in a dial-up ISP, all of which i had to know absolutely nothing about since i had to port them into QNX (our servers ran in this OS).  i also didn't know gcc approximately from 2.3.1 to 2.7.1.  i might've managed to port one of those into QNX.