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Profiles /
ChrisI had my first real experience with computers in the mid 1980s while at primary school, doing vector graphics on the Sorcerer's Apprentice and writing interactive stories using Twist-A-Plot (on Apple //e computers). A little later, my brother and I bought an Atari XE system (basically a cartridge-based console with a keyboard and light gun), inherited an obscure Hitachi MB-6890 system (with gigantic dual floppy disk drive), and finally bought an Amiga 500 after drooling over the multimedia capabilities for ages. I bought the cheapest parallel-port audio digitiser I could find and got crazy with ProTracker?, as well as trying my hand at 3D work with Sculpt-Animate 4D and Real3D?, and 2D graphics with DeluxePaint?, Fantavision, and so on. Oh, and games, too! Later we saved up for an Amiga 1200 (with gigantic 40 MiB? hard drive!), and expanded the hardware further when we could afford it. Life was good, and we saw online communities move from BBS to the Internet (which the Amiga just avoided missing out on). I first got started with free software in the mid 1990s, running NetBSD and Linux (Debian) on the Amiga 1200 (although the framebuffer performance made using X less than fun). I tried to get PostgreSQL running so I could do some course work on it, but gave up after discovering it hadn't been ported to the M68000 series! I also used Macs quite a bit during the 1990s, as they were all over the university campus when I was studying, and my parents had bought a Macintosh LCII in about 1992. In 1999 I bought my first PC, a 350 MHz? Pentium II system, bundled with Windows 98. I got (at auction) a nice cheap Voodoo Banshee AGP card and a 19" NEC CRT monitor, which I loved until the monitor's line output transformer died and couldn't be replaced. I remember playing Unreal, Star Wars Episode I Racer and Driver and being amazed at the immersiveness. Recently I've been running Gentoo on my cheap Dell notebook, and gearing up to replacing Windows with Linux on my main desktop system. I also have a file/mail/print/Web/etc. server running NetBSD?. I'm still interested in multimedia, and had a go at the RPM Challenge in February 2007. I ended up spending most of the month tinkering with software, and didn't get an album recorded, but it was still time well spent. I'm particularly interested in using Pure Data to build interesting sonic machinery, and using Ardour for more traditional multi-track recording. Also, I played guitar in a band called Vicious Mandy from 2004-2005, and engineered a number of our recordings, both live and in our own makeshift studio in the practice room. I'm also still interested in 3D graphics, and had a proper play with POV-Ray in 2006, doing some animation and titles for a pageant being produced by a neighbourhood church group. I teach database systems at the University of Otago, and have long been interested in the design of database models, and more recently in ideas for computer systems that provide users with useful high-level abstractions for getting things done. I heard about DunLUG in 2006 from Monica and Wayne, and have managed to get to a couple of meetings so far! Looking forward to meeting the rest of you! |