Some of My Technical Interests

Apple

I had the pleasure of working for Apple for approximately 12 years. I've been a fan of Mac OS since System 7. These days both Rich and I use, prefer, and recommend Mac OS X.

Can you tell? We don't do Windoze!

BSD (Unix)

We're long-time Unix fans in our household, dating from 1983. We prefer the BSD variant; these days, that translates to Free BSD

The Web

It took me a little while to fall in love with the Web; I think I waited until 1994 ;-) I've been a convert ever since. I've had my own web pages since late 1994 or early 1995. These days I am especially interested in weblogs and other "social software".

Open Source Software

Open Source is a philosophy. We think it's the best future direction for software.

Techie Toys

I love toys. Among my favorite techie toys are a Kyocera 7135 (PalmOS "smartphone" PDA), my Macintosh, and a really nice lttle digital camera.

Books

I read for pleasure but also to learn new things. I have compiled a list of some of the techincal books I recommend.

Software

What would a computer be without software? I have compiled a list of some of the "must-have" software I use and recommend for Mac OS X and Palm OS.

Anti-Spam

<begin soapbox>
I love the Internet. I hate Spam.

I believe fervently that email is the best way to communicate... and these #^$@! spammers are polluting my world!

We need some good, strong, easy to use methods of blocking, filtering, and halting spam. However, I am deeply concerned that government regulations are ISP naivet' will combine to interfere with the flow of legitimate bulk mail while doing little to stop the dissemination of "enlarge your package using offshore HGH" junk mail.

Sigh. :-(
<end soapbox>

These days, my personal Spam-fighting strategy includes a combination of procmail and Spam Assassin on the server side and Eudora as my desktop email reader.

There is a lot of spam-fighting stuff in my .procmailrc file and we've added a bunch of "house rules" to SpamAssassin's local.cf file.

You may also be interested in an article I wrote on using Spam Assassin [PDF download].

Fonts

I love fonts. I collect fonts. I especially love "handwritten" fonts. As a programmer, however, and constant email user, I need to use fixed-width fonts, preferably with easily distinguished characters. So how do I mix and match my love for handwritten fonts with fixed-width programmer's fonts? Take a look at some of the cool fixed-width fonts I've found!

Perl, PHP, etc.

"Scripting languages" are the best programming languages!

My first programming language was FORTRAN, followed by PL/C. When I discovered Unix, in 1983, I started using C, awk, sh, and sed (predominately awk).

In 1995, I learned Perl; after that, I moved most of my programming work to Perl. (Perl has adds the power of C to the flexibility of awk without requiring the goo of C).

In 2005, I started learning a lot about PHP. I like what I've seen so far. And recently, Rich has been extolling the virtues of Ruby. Stay tuned...

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Take a look at some of my bookmarks for more...