Finally…

I guess I couldn’t avoid it any longer. My own website. Not that I did not know how, mind you. I actually created quite a lot of websites, but always for other people. I guess I never got around to my own. But now, after 10 years or so, I finally have my own little corner on the web.

A little bit about me

It’s a personal homepage after all, so I guess I should tell a bit about myself. So here goes… Once upon a time… Serously, I am a graphic designer by profession and open-source programmer at night. I started out as a Computer Science student, but quickly switched to an Art School, because I came to realize I really missed being creative. Or perhaps it was because sculpting nude models seemed so much more appealing than learning how to introduce new bugs into perfectly working applications. Together with my father, who is also a graphic designer, we are currently running our own design firm.

Open source

I am a big supporter of open source software. The idea that software is created for the common good has appealed to me for a long time, so I tried to use it as often as possible. But my involvement does not stop there. For one of the projects I created for Creatype I used an the open source banner manager phpAdsNew. After submitting my patches back to the original developers I continued to make improvements and eventually I became the lead on the development of phpAdsNew 2.0. phpAdsNew is a GPLed project which means it is free – as in freedom.

The next step in my involvement with the open source community is helping out PJ with Groklaw. As you may be aware, The SCO Group has sued IBM, Novell, AutoZone over Linux, an open source operating system created by Linus Torvalds. Groklaw attempts to cut through the FUD and offer an explaination to what is happening in the courts. Groklaw is simply the place to learn more about these lawsuits. My involvement with Groklaw is helping out with transcriptions of official court documents, some speed and load optimalisations of Geeklog – the software that drives the Groklaw website – and the addition of some other features.