User:Klaatu

Klaatu

I'm a Unix and Linux enthusiast and, lately, professional. I use mostly Slackware, with a healthy dose of Red Hat and Fedora thrown in for fun and work. I programme a little; BASH, Python, and C++ have been my weapons of choice so far, although I'm eager to learn other languages (especially elisp). I write a lot and have technical articles published in magazines, books, and online, plus some fiction books which are available both online and in paperback.

I was trained as a filmmaker, so I am heavily involved in filmmaking activities on many different scales (I have done independent work mostly but lately have been hired to work on some bigger projects). Sometimes I also do podcasts.

Podcasts

• Gnu World Order is my personal Linux oggcast, and as far as I know the first podcast to release shows in ogg vorbis and speex formats only (that is, no proprietary codecs are offered). The show discusses any geeky topic I want to cover; Sometimes this includes Fedora and RHEL.
• Hacker Public Radio is a daily podcast for which I am a correspondent. I cover lots of different things on this show, including interviews with KDE devs, Fedora people, and even an episode on how to create an RPM using rpmbuild.
• Kernel Panic Oggcast is a brash and bold round table for which I am one of the regular panelists.
• Fedora Reloaded was a show that me and a friend, Skirlet, had inherited and ran for a while, but sadly our schedules have just become to disparate to manage. The show died a quiet, untimely death. Secretly, I'd love to continue it, but realistically I know I wouldn't have the time.
• Linux Cranks was the father and mother of Kernel Panic Oggcast.
• Today in Tech Radio was an off-shoot of Linux Cranks, meant to be slightly more professional. It no longer exists either.

Contact

• Email: klaatu at the domain of the second podcast listed above
• IRC: notKlaatu in freenode IRC
• Fedora Account: klaatu
• Jabber: notKlaatu on jabber-dot-org

Activities within Fedora

• I promote Fedora as often as I feel necessary.
• I interview Fedora people whenever I get a chance to, primarily at Linux conventions.
• As a freelance author, I wrote 6 of 8 articles for the Linux Identity Fedora 11 issue, available in your local bookstore, a Fedora FAQ that they seem to re-use whenever they feel like they need one, and a lot of other articles later on, including quite a few for Fedora 14 and 15, 18, and so on.

Linuxy Activities, Tutorials, How-to's

• Slackermedia contains evolving tutorials on accomplishing multimedia creation on Linux. I use Slackware as my jumping-off point for multimedia, but much of what I write about on Slackermedia applies to Fedora, especially since I sometimes borrow Fedora and CCRMA packages using rpm2tgz.
• Linux Journal, Linux Pro, Linux Format, Linux Identity, and Linux+ have published articles written by me.
• I wrote an article for the very cool Libre Graphics magazine.
• I wrote and maintain a nice, basic application called trashy that lets the user move things to the system trash via the command line, as well as empty it when they are sure they want to delete the files. It is meant as a sane intermediary for the very dangerous (yet strangely, for all of its potential damage, ubiquitous) rm command. Since trashy is in BASH, it is very portable and free of dependencies. It flirts with but is not married to (since it does not assume a user has a desktop) FreeDesktop specs.
• I wrote and maintain an application called Shaker Loops, which shakes the mouse every few minutes. Seems silly, but believe it or not whilst administering dozens of Linux machines, going into System Settings and deactivating screensavers for every single one becomes tedious. With Shaker Loops, I can just turn that on to defeat screensavers, and do my maintenance as needed.
• I maintain Vance L. Simpson's screenwriter-mode, an emacs extension for writing industry-standard screenplays in GNU Emacs. Well, really I maintain a fork of it, since I can't seem to find Vance anywhere online. My fork contains a few minor patches; one improves usability and the other adds functionality. An RPM for this is forthcoming.