About My Site and More About Me

Some of my pages are kind of old. Last time I used RedHat was version 7.2. Many of the MS Windows programs in Downloads date back to version 3.1 (16 bit). I'm not certain if everything still works these days. Windows 10/11 doesn't play well with 16-bit.

Main Page

Ignoring the navigational bar on the left of my page, my home page has a few navigational links, but is mostly a few favorites and useful search tools that is still blank enough that I can load it in work for the IRC lookup.

Navigational Bar

Providers

Links for Linux Distributions I use currently, Web host, and Internet Service Provider and any other essentials.

Research

Added a few research tools.

Multimedia

Mostly Photographs, with some miscellaneous documents collected from various email or links I've received.

Minions of Mirth

A few pages dedicated to the game including character stats, hints and maps. This is probably the most updated area of my site.

Miscellaneous

Mostly just that, some are outside links, others collections of useful information, tutorials or just toys, and my seldom updated blog.

Programming

All kinds of fun stuff, from CGI, javascript, bash, basically samples of code for my educational experience. Some are even useful. Source code is available.

How To

Various tutorials or notes I've written over the years. Many of these are woefully out of date.

Downloads

Educational and useful. I used to update my computer as quickly as possible and many of the utilities were must haves when I installed or reinstalled. Please note that you may need an emulator for some of this software, much of it is 16bit.

More About Me

I became seriously interested in programming while back in elementary school when the school got it's first computer for the classroom. It was a TRS-80, possibly Model II back in the 80s. My aunt had puchased a Model I for my cousin at about the same time. My previous experience was a programming cartridge on the Magnavox Odyssey 2.

On the TRS-80 I went from typing programs, to "What happens when I change this?" In High School I took Computer Math 1-6 during which I learned to program in BASIC, back when it still used line numbers, Pascal and a little bit of Fortran. We had TRS-80's in High School as well, think they were Model III or IV. I had a C-64 back then at home and played around with BASIC and Pascal on that too.

In college I was interested in programming and picked up a second semester class using "C". I didn't know "C" at the time but it was very easy to pick up after having experience with Pascal. I had an assembler class as well.

That pretty much covers my educational background with computers.

These days when I'm awake and not working I enjoy playing computer games and programming, with an occasional game of Pinochle thrown in for good measure. Playing around with CGI for the web gave me a chance to get back into programming. I do know some basic HTML and enough CGI to get me into trouble.

The closest thing I've ever owned to a TRS-80 was a Tandy 1000HX, which was essentially a PC clone and came with MS-DOS 2.11. But I did play around with converting some TRS-80 BASIC games to play on the PC.

I prefer the command line and was not an early adopter of MS Windows, but did finally cave to MS Windows 3.1 in the early 90s. I played around with Windows until MS Windows 2000 and heard UNIX clones were available. Started playing with NetBSD. Nothing like a 98M download over dialup. I'm not certain if it even had the X Windowing System. From there I went to RedHat 7.2. Then I tried Mandrake, Slackware, Debian, Knoppix, Gentoo, Ubuntu, and Fedora.

At some point Apple had switched over to OS X and had seemed to be making an effort to create a UNIX environment. I had enough money to purchase a decent laptop and opted for a Macbook Pro. I got my feet wet and ended up building a modest library in ITunes. Just large enough to put up with the aggravation I encounter when building programs from source that aren't available for the Mac.

These days, outside of work, I use Windows 11 for my primary machine, OS X for my laptop, and Debian for a web server and file server. The primary webserver and outside shell account I use runs NetBSD.

In my opinion Windows improved up to around 2000/XP, though I never found Windows to be a particularly nice developing environment. OS X while easy on the eyes doesn't make porting Windows programs or Linux programs very easy. Linux at this point is stable, easy to use, and the material available ranging from available applications to tutorials rivals Windows.

Most of the tools that I use on the Mac, I had started using on Linux (or Unix in a handful of cases.) The majority of my coding is now done in Emacs, though I try to use Vim enough not to forget the basics.

I use a Makefile to keep this site up to date. I don't really have a preferred image viewer. My Graphic editor is Gimp on all three platforms. ImageMagick was used for many image conversions.