New Maintainers
This is a summary of the AM report for Week Ending 29 Feb 2004.
4 applicants became maintainers.
David Harris <dbharris>
David writes, "I'm currently living in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. I'm
23 years old, and a systems administrator by heredity and trade. I've
worked professionally for 5 years, and non-professionally (typically at
night, when nobody else was around) for a couple of years before that.
I was first introduced to Debian via 2.1 (though it's possible I might
have been introduced to it much earlier via a set of Infomagic CDs),
and since the release of 2.2 I've taken a more active role in the
Debian community as a whole. For the past two and a half years, I've
been more involved with the packaging side of things.
I've been using and operating computers since I was a young boy - I
believe I was around four when I was allowed to play with a parent's
mainframe login, and I was around five or six when I received my first
personal computer, an Atari. These days I tend to stick with commodity
hardware, as it's plentiful, cheap, and powerful (enough)."
David maintains gmrun, gqmpeg, ipband, shaper, snac, and sopwith. He
is also a co-maintainer for alsa-driver, alsa-lib, alsa-modules-i386,
alsa-oss, alsa-utils, dpatch
Theodore Karkoulis <bilbo>
I am a 22-year old developer from Athens, Greece, where I am doing my
BSc in Software Engineering (grad. date:Aug-2004). I have worked in an
IT corporation developing dynamic web pages, digital surveillance
software and Linux clusters, as well a a popular music channel in
Athens(MAD), where I worked with PHP and databases, as the whole
channel was not using tapes, but a video server. I am a free-lancer at
the moment because I must finish my BSc this year, hence I have no
time to work anywhere. I am doing a bit of free-lancing work, though,
focused on Web Development and mobile phone (Java/C ++ on Symbian)
development.
I got in touch with debian 2,5 years ago, when I started looking for a
decent platform to host my software development activities (and a
stable desktop OS). It is my base (and only) development platform
since then. I instantly wanted to contribute to debian, because it
made my life so much easier (especially with the apt system). Of
course, I want to contribute to the Open Source Community as a whole,
for helping me with all the open-source software, tutorials, comments,
bug fixes etc. I believe I can help the Debian Community with packaging
and package testing & bug fixing, but I would be very interested in
porting Debian to other architectures (PowerPC is the only
arch. besides i386 that I can work on at the moment, though, excluding
my Symbian mobile).
Theodore maintains kbarcode.
Berin Lautenbach <berin>
My day job is in computer security. Have covered a number of areas
including administering large scale firewall installations, ITSEC
evaluation and consultation in computer security and IT Risk
Management. ~ Currently working in IT Risk Management for one of the
banks in Australia.
I first got involved in public domain software (prior to Open Source)
about 12 years ago when I was running a BBS in Canberra. The BBS was
mainly devoted to programming, and I wrote a number of packages for
Sysops that became used around the world. (Yabom - for mail
management, and Yatic for file distribution management.)
My introduction to Linux was about 8 years ago with Slackware. Have
played with Linux on and off over the years, but the bulk of my UNIX
experience is with SunOS and Solaris. Have heavily used Open Source
software just in general support of Solaris systems (Apache, SSL, SSH,
OpenSSH, Tripwire, MRTG, etc. etc. etc.)
More recently, I started getting back into the development side of
Open Source when I started getting more into business style consulting
in security. Wanted to keep the technical side of things going, so
started looking at XML and the various emerging security standards.
Needed a Linux distribution to work on at home, and discovered Debian.
Liked it a lot, but it didn't have some of the libraries I used up to
date. So started looking at what I could do to get them packaged.
Found myself really enjoying it, so thought maybe there was more I
could do there.
What do I want to do? My real skill set lies in security. I have a
feeling that that area is very well covered off, but one never knows.
I've also done a bit in the programming area over time (currently
working on the Apache XML-Security-C library implementing the W3C
security standards). I think I can contribute in a number of areas on
both fronts. Also done a fair bit on general system admin over time.
Why do I want to volunteer my time? First and foremost, I get a real
kick out of making things work. If I can do something useful to
others at the same time then why not? Secondly - I have used a relied
on Open Source software over the course of my career. It's helped me
out innumerable times. Again - maybe something I do can help someone
else out similarly.
Finally - I honestly believe it's the best way to give people choice.
A healthy, vibrant Open Source community will make sure that whatever
commercial software is out there will always have competition. And
that's what makes the computer industry change and evolve.
Berin maintains xalan.
Daniel Ruoso <ruoso>
I had my first experience with a programming language when I was 6
years old (1990) typing the example programs that came with the manual
of my old MSX Gradiente Expert. Ok, at that time I was really just
typing the ugly BASIC code without understanding a single line (except
the PRINT, GOTO and PLAY commands. A FOR loop was too much for
me:). But when I finally got my 486 DXII 66 (1993) I started playing
with qbasic (already understanding what I was doing). From that time
to now, many things happened...
From 1994 to 1997 I started studying Object Pascal and did some work
(with my brother) with Delphi, but then I started to discover Linux (I
started with Debian) and more important then this, I discovered Perl
:). And this is when I started to work in an ISP as customer support,
but started to create some helpful Perl scripts and CGIs, which
created me an opportunity to start working in a company that created
an Email Service Provider, and the project started just when I started
working there. In this time I was using icewm and trying to read email
with fmail (I don't remember if this is the name but it's a tk mail
agent that can connect to IMAP, i know i could use Netscape mailer,
but I just hate it).
This is when I start in Free Software, creating my first CPAN module,
Server::FastPL which has been removed, since it didn't work really
nice because Unix Sockets simply wasn't ok at that time. And in August
2001 I started the biggest open source project I'm involved (in amount
of code and scope) that is Perl Oak (http://perl-oak.sourceforge.net),
which really was nice and pretty. And in 2003 I started programming in
Java (ugh) J2EE (that was not my choice). But what I really like to
code is the Oak2 Project, which I has just started (help needed).
I'm on the team of the Debian Perl Group, and maintain
cvs-autoreleasedeb and maildir-filter (that is still waiting for the
override). I'm starting to package Oak, but maybe I'll wait for Oak2
to be ready.
Daniel also maintains libboulder-perl and libcgi-formalware-perl.
Thanks (as usual) to Pascal Hakim for compiling this listing.
--
Martin Michlmayr
tbm@cyrius.com
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