Geek

At the end of the day, I’m probably best described as a Geek. It’s a title I’m not insulted by any more. I’m even a little proud of my geekiness. One of my geekiest aspects is what I study (Cognitive Neuroscience), but you’ll have to head over to the student page for that. In this page I’ll quickly go over my non-academic geekeries.

Open Source

I’m a massive open source nut. This is reflective of my wider world views1, but is most apparent when manifest in my choice of software because it’s so easy to get into open source. Most of the other things on this page are related to this ethos.

Linux

I’ve been running Linux for a few years now. I started off running OpenSUSE, but got frustrated by the complexity of dependency management2. I now run Kubuntu3 and really love it.

I’d definitely recommend trying Linux to any Windows user - especially desktop users. Give it a go and don’t give up. You’ll learn so much, you’ll get more out of your computer, you’ll be part of a great movement and (hopefully) you might even enjoy it!

Web development

I really enjoy building and modifying web applications. My programming training began with VBS macros in Excel and I’ve never had any formal training, but I’ve been writing code for a many years now and have developed a solid understanding of programming paradigms - the hard way.

My web apps are generally written in a lot of PHP and a little bit of Perl. There are plenty posts on the web about why PHP sucks and sure, it has it’s faults, but it has plenty of great things going for it too. Furthemore, I rarely use PHP from scratch these days anyway, but rather stand on the shoulders of giants by adapting wordpress or by using the incredible symfony framework. Watch this space for a portfolio of my web-app work.

Open standards compliance

This could easily be two separate point. The first is that I believe standards should be open and interchangeable viz. openoffice vs microsoft office file formats. The second is that I believe it’s important to comply to universally agreed standards e.g.xhtml.

Footnotes:

  1. that information is a commons resource, not something to be bought and sold [↩]
  2. Though don’t let this put you off trying it, it was generally really good. Different distros suit different people. And it was a couple of years ago now… [↩]
  3. Partly because I can’t stand gnome, partly because I couldn’t live without amarok. [↩]

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