About Me - From a computing perspective

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Short Introduction

I'm not very communicative, neither in real life nor online. So I thought it might be a good idea to write a little bit about me. Just in case someone feels the need to know more about my person.

My hometown is Bautzen. It is located in the very east of Germany, near the borders to Czechia and Poland. Without great rivers, big mountains, and stormy weather, based on a granite plate which prevents earth quakes, it's a very nice and safe place to live.

In rare cases I may hang around on IRC channels with the nickname »roccofrank«. Usually the best way to get in contact with me is to write an e-mail.

Beginning of 1976

Reluctantly left mothers womb. Space was slowly lacking in there.

Late 1980s

First contact with a computer. During a family gathering my uncle showed up with a KC 87. Played extensively Helicopter together with my cousin.

Around 1990

Got some school lessons in BASIC programming on a KC 85. Bought my first own computer. It *is* a C64C with a floppy drive. Still lies around somewhere. Started to educate myself in programming. Mostly Assembler, as BASIC was very limited with 64kB memory. Was interested in demo scene at that time. Gathered a lot of 5¼ inch floppy disks, 64'er magazines, and some demo scene related newspapers.

Sometime in between

Took a regular class in COMAL programming.

1992

Finished school and started a 3½ year apprenticeship as electrician, sometimes called spark snatcher in Germany. Had some additional boring BASIC lessons and got teached in programming of PLCs.

Mid 1990s

First x86 machine, some Pascal programming under DOS, went to army as radio operator, nothing spectacular.

1998

Got employed by Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) for their new manufacturing facility in Dresden (Saxony). During rampup I was an odd-job man for engineers, interesting work anyway. Climbed up the ladder quite quickly and currently maintain some of the needed tools. This has not much to do with software at all. Mostly pure handcraft.

1999 and following years

My first contact with Linux. Bought one of the Redhat 5.2 boxes from a local bookseller and started to poke around. Didn't make any contributions due the focus on my second hobby at that time. Simply used it and followed the path through RH6, RH7, RH9, FC2, FC3... The later RH releases were refined with Ximian packages. Teached myself HTML, PHP, and a little bit Perl.

Around 2002

Decided to make a cut and started to use Linux almost exclusivly.

End of 2004

Time to give back. Started to do some translation work on GNOME. This quickly resulted in an involvement to Gnome Schedule, which is written in Python. So I learnt Python and started to write bug reports and some patches.

Mid 2005

Bought a new laptop. Main reason was my attendance at GUADEC6, held in Stuttgart, Germany. I chose a 15 inch Apple PowerBook. Unfortunatly this thing was quite new and the touchpad didn't work under Linux. This quickly annoyed me and I started to write my own driver based on some work of Johannes Berg. It turned out that Stelian Pop was at it too. As I don't have any experience in kernel and C programming, I decided to contribute small portions of plain driver logic to Stelians work. This way my name slipped into the Linux kernel sources and I got mentioned in a sidenote of the German Linux Magazin as "contributing programmer"...funny somehow :)

End 2005

Took two classes sponsored by my employer: "Unix Introduction" and "Unix Advanced". Little bit boring, but I must admit I've learnt some tricks.

Beginning of 2006

Sent a package review request to Fedora Extras. If all goes well, I will package Gnome Schedule for Fedora in the future.

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