Tuesday, November 17, 2009

Start of my Open Source stints

I believe I started doing computer related works as early as 1996. Way back then, I was a young and energetic green-horn who has very limited to no knowledge of operating systems internals, networking and simple programming. Everything changed when I got my first desktop PC from the office, a crude looking Pentium 100 with 8 megs of ram!

Back then, it was a goldmine to have such an equipment and to think that you will a chance to mess around with one of the most talked about hype in computer technology at that time. Windows 95, yes, I admit windows has fostered me to what I am right now and I remember how many times I crashed my Windows 95 system! Back then installers came in 3.5" floppy disk of 18 or more disk plus the pain of having to reinstall it again and again to compensate for my sanity.

After a couple of months a good fried came by and dropped me a paper back which spells Running WINDOWS 95. I thought, this could be the thing I was looking for a cheat kit with much of the information I need to learn what windows really was and what makes it tick. Soon after I became fairly proficient with its basic administration task and going by the entire UI of the system at that time. Immediately, this caught the attention of my office mates and superiors. Indeed, the aftermath is worth all the effort and sleepless nights trying to trickle on the base components of the system and learning how the system works and understanding its behaviour.

Soon enough it became evident at that time that there will be a item for a would information technology officer in the office (which took some time before it got off), where I was the most likely candidate. This of-course never happened for reasons both political and professional? I don't know but today I saw that the office has its own website and its own set of admins manage and maintained by former colleagues who has help me shape the way I am.

[To be continued....

Its been almost a year since the last post.  I will now complete the package here read on]

2000 - 2003 has been a year of golden opportunities for me both as a career person and as a family man.  I experienced what is like managing systems under which everything is unclean and thus perform barbaric methods to clean an entire system fully ripe with all sorts of virus infection etc.  This lasted for almost 3 years and in those 3 years I learned alot about hardware stuff.

2003 was the first time I get to work as a local school teacher teaching technology courses on (Windows and Office), to grade school students.  It also gave me an opportunity to dabble with open source projects and have those taught to very young minds.   It was the third release of the highly acclaimed "BAYANIHAN LINUX" of the government funded Advance Science Technology Institute.

I happily taught and brought in speakers from the agency to help students realise and fully understand the concept of open source technology using Linux as a desktop operating choice aside from Windows.