jmelesky had the kindness to certify me
as apprentice. He says:
"The tragedy of my life is that i disdain
Perl, and yet rely on it for my livelihood.
*sigh*"
I know how it feels... I don't like scripting languages
ever since the first time I tried to write a real life
application in gwbasic. And the tragedy of my life is
relying on M$ Access development for my livelihood.
I have not previously been active in Open Source
advocacy or development, but I am impressed by it.
I have spent countless hours over the last 2 years trying
to find some free disk space to get myself a working Linux
partition. Of all the things that made me believe (hope)
Linux is the way of the future Gimp and the desktop
themes convinced me. The Gimp because it is cross-platform
and desktop themes because I can (point to it and) say "you
try that on WinXX".
By the way, people spend so much time putting Linux down
for being too hard to use or install - don't believe the
hype. Every other day I have new problems with the NT
servers and workstations I look after. I recently had an NT
install where it needed to access the floppy to load the
SCSI drivers - "There is no floppy drive on this
PC" - but there was one, four attempts later I had to
make some install disks and boot from floppy (instead of
CD) that worked... after that there was the network card
problem... and about a hundred restarts later it finally
goes. Give me insmod and ifconfig any time!
Recently I had the good fortune to win a contract to
develop a community web site. My client, was far sighted
enough to allow me to base the whole thing around Open
Source software. I was looking around for a suitable web
based discussion board, but only recently did I discover
mod_virgule. Not only is it written in C - but it has Trust
Metrics - I was going to have a sort of a referendum
generator, but I think trust metrics are a more appropriate
way of managing a community site. Anyway,
I intend to try building it as soon as I've got my new web
server set up.
I'm hoping that my requirements line up with the work
currently being done on mod_virgule by
lkcl et al. I would be keen to participate
in my first Open Source project.