User:Tschak
Hello everyone, I'm Thomas Cherryhomes.
About Me
I am a person who is interested in many things in life. As such I have sprouted into many different interests, hobbies, and directions throughout it.
Personal: Location
I live in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, not far from Central Station. I have a small studio apartment here for now. I moved here from Texas in July, but I have lived many places in the world so far, and want to continue to experience living in as many places as possible as my life continues.
I live there with my girlfriend, and future wife, Quynh Chu Thu. She is a Linguistics/Translation student (finishing her Masters...) from Vietnam by way of Poland, and is here in the states taking courses in Business English at EF International Schools in Brighton.
If you would like my contact information, please contact me on my User Talk page, and we can exchange further emails. I wish I could put it here, but I can't trust that my information won't get crawled and used for heinous purposes. I do have my email address on file, so you can email me from within the wiki.
Personal: Hobbies
- Writing music/sound synthesis
- Programming
- Skydiving
- Watching movies
- Listening to music
- Reading
- Developing Visual Art (more of a layout and typography person, but I can draw as well.)
Education
I am primarily self-taught in everything that I currently do. I was exposed to computing at an early age, and as such it became the fabric of my entire life. I am however, saving up money so that I can re-enter school, finish my undergrads in Computer Science, and continue on towards a Graduate program, so that I may acquire a Masters and eventually a Doctorate in Computer Science.
Computing
Programming Languages
I have at least some experience in all of the following:
- C
- Objective-C
- PHP
- Ruby
- Python
- Smalltalk
- FORTH
- LISP
- CSOUND
- MAX/MSP / Pure-Data
- Assembler on a smattering of CPUs (6502, 68000, X86, Z80/8080 etc.)
History
I was exposed to computers at a very early age. When I was born, my father already had a Radio Shack TRS-80 Model I and an Atari 800 (both with multiple floppy disk drives.) in the house. By the time I was three years old, I had started to learn programming in BASIC on both the TRS-80 and Atari 800, and started writing simple games. I also was introduced to LOGO during this time, (and I do have to say that the Atari 800 implementation of LOGO was simply fantastic, making full use of the Atari's Player/Missile Graphic objects..), and by the time I was 7, had started programming Assembler, asking my father to buy a copy of MAC/65. To this day, I still find the MOS 6502 CPU to be a very well designed CPU in terms of functionality and efficient use of its design (it is true the stack is a wee bit small for big languages like C or LISP, but that's okay.. 6502 assembler is simple enough.). To this day, I thank Chuck Peddle and Bill Mensch for creating such an accessible piece of silicon, and I find it very ironic that the CPU that revolutionised personal computing to the masses in the late 70s and early 80s was not even intended for computer use! (It was meant to be a microcontroller for embedded applications!)
As an Aside, I am working with Ben Heckendorn to fabricate an Atari 800 Laptop for my own use. I will post more information about it later, but for now, here is a picture.
As time moved on, I was exposed to even more computers, so many I can't list them all. my memorable moments in the 8-bit era were the Commodore 64, and the Atari 800. (both machines had their strengths, fellas. and there are things in one that can't be done on the other.), and as 16 bit machines approached, we had an IBM PC 5150 in the house (which I considered primitive next to even my Atari 800.), as well as later an Atari 1040ST (which I would later use to build around my first Music studio.) .. my father also had gotten over the years, a NeXT cube, a Macintosh (and I had found a LISA much later.), and my personal favourite, the Commodore-Amiga (I have owned a 1000, 500, 2000, and a 4000).
As the Amiga and Atari ST I was using faded from mainstream use to the more niche uses in my music doodlings.... I moved, kicking and screaming, to the PC Compatible world. Dragging out my Atari and Commodore 64 occasionally to use them for nostalgia.
As I was introduced to UNIX by my own exploration, I wanted a UNIX environment to run on my PC. In 1991, I had these choices:
- Coherent ($99 ... was cheap, but it seemed more like just a way to run commercial Sys V apps cheaply)
- Minix ($150 .. wasn't as cheap, but it had full source to the OS, even if it was a wee bit simple.)
- BSDI ($1500) .. full 4.3BSD..but how was the lawsuit with USL going to turn out? echoes of today, huh?
- NeXTSTEP/486 .. damn, that's not gonna be out until next year!
- GNU .... (Where is it?)
I chose Minix, and ran it on my PC, for a short while.. It was cool, but I made the mistake of wanting it to be a complete UNIX. It just wasn't. Also the single synchronous IO thread was enough to drive me batty. meanwhile on comp.os.minix, I had found out about a little kernel being written called Linux, and downloaded a copy from funet. Wasn't much there yet... but I kept watch anyway, and watched the kernel grow up a ton. by the middle of 1992, I was bootstrapping my own copy atop minix with gcc and the binutils etc.
I really enjoyed Linux at first because, I could use it, it was stable, and I could poke around and see how things worked underneath when I was curious. The BSDs would eventually shake off their patent shackles and follow suit as time went on, and I tried them too, and enjoyed using them.
But I wanted other people to be able to enjoy the stability and power of UNIX as well, (maybe I was, and am asking for too much?).. And over the years, I tracked the development of Desktop environments for UNIX all the way to the current incarnations of GNOME/KDE/GNUstep/XFCE et al, and even participated as a volunteer tester for Eazel during the testing of Nautilus from the release of PR1 onwards to their final release 1.0.6 in April of 2001.
Many years would pass, and I would slowly shed my Windows environment entirely for Linux, and relegate my other computers slowly to storage. Linux has been my primary OS since 1999.
Today, I continue to track the progress of the free software community, and use the software as much as I can, contributing where I can.
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My Work
I am currently employed as a contractor serving a contract with Fidelity Investments doing Wiki-web development for their Registered Investment Advisor group. We are using MediaWIKI as well, and I am customising it for their needs, as well as training them on how to use it.
Until May of 2006, I was a founder of a functioning think-tank called Juntos Group. From 2000 until May of 2006, we developed solutions for a wide variety of clients, but I had to leave the company due to conflicts of personality.
I do my best to gently introduce corporations to the virtues of free and open source software where it makes sense to them in their infrastructure.
Contact
You may contact me via my talk page, or by sending me an email via the wiki.
--Tschak 14:26, 19 November 2006 (EST)