There's no page like home page.
There's no page like home page.
Come into the mountains, dear friend
Leave society and take no one with you
But your true self
Get close to nature
Your everyday games will be insignificant
Notice the clouds spontaneously forming patterns
And try to do that with your life- Susan Polis Schutz
(Poem used with permission of Blue Mountain Arts).
My name is Eric Maryniak
[
![[Eric Maryniak - Photo - 2008-08-08]](http://pobox.com/~e.maryniak/images/ericface-2008-48x48.png){kind=small}
photo,
![[Eric Maryniak - Audio, 52 Kb WAV file]](http://pobox.com/~e.maryniak/images/speaker.png){kind=small}
audio
].
I went into Computing Science pretty soon after I got my master's in Biology at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in 1986. This change of profession was due to a bad employment situation for biologists at that time. I started as a Unix system programmer and administrator in a small Unix company.
After that, I worked for more than a year at the University of Leiden, where I wrote educational programs in Pascal and C.
From 1988 to 1992 I worked as a member of the technical staff at the institute of Applied mathematics, faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science) of the Delft University of Technology. My tasks were widespread, ranging from system and network administration of workstations and training of students, to the development of several computer programs for the research staff.
Then, I went to the faculty of Mechanical, Maritime and Materials Engineering (at the same university). I worked there until june 1994.
In both cases the emphasis of my work was on software engineering, mostly in
Modula-2, C++ and, my favorite, Eiffel. All on a wide variety of
platforms, ranging from PC's, via workstations, to mainframes, and under even
a bigger variety of operating systems and (graphical) user interfaces.
In July 1994, I started working at the Geological Survey of the Netherlands, or Rijks Geologische Dienst (RGD) in Dutch (formerly www.rgd.nl). Early in 1997, the RGD and a TNO institute were merged to form a new TNO institute (called TNO-NITG then). I also left the RGD at that time.
My job was analysing and programming technical and scientific applications.
I was also known there as the "Internet expert".
There is a Dutch saying, that goes: "in the land of the blind, the one-eyed
is king" :-). Anyway, that's the reason why I was the
webmaster
and the Internet Liaison or
ICP
(Instellings Contact Persoon) for the RGD to
SURFnet
(the access provider of the RGD).
One of my first projects was providing Internet e-mail to everybody.
This project was a big success and made the people very enthusiastic about
Internet. Mail was implemented with
Eudora under Windows 3.1 over
a 10 Mbs TCP/IP Ethernet LAN with SMTP and POP3 services via a
Sun Unix server, running Solaris.
My work also included HTML authoring; you may want to check my
Pemberton
script, written in Perl,
with which I made various compound documents, such as the webmaster and ICP
handbooks mentioned above.
I also introduced
NexTrieve from
Nexial Systems, a fine fuzzy search
engine, with which I made various online searchable HTML and structured text
databases, such as geological maps, all publications in the RGD library and a
personal directory.
All these databases seem to have disappeared after the merger.
I also made the personal directory available via X.500, URL
<http://ldap.surfnet.nl:8888/c=NL> at that time.
It disappeared in 1998.
In a lot of cases I used
Perl for various database
conversions (including complicated legacy databases) and appreciate this tool
very much; Larry: Power to the camels! :-)
I also participated in an ISO
9000
audit team.
In 1997, I worked briefly at the
Image Sciences Institute
of the department of Medicine at the
Utrecht University.
My job was software engineering, giving programming courses
(C++ mainly), system administration and Internet and WWW.
Most of my time, however, went into co-managing a very complicated and
heterogenous Unix network, and introducing Windows NT 4.0.
As I'm more a programmer than an administrator, I started at the Netherlands Institute for Scientific Information Services (NIWI) (a KNAW institute) in September 1997. My work concentrated on WWW and Internet programming, and making databases available online as well as producing paper products from them.
From September 1999 to September 2002, I worked on a 3-year contract as
a software engineer in a small
research team developing
applications for the simulation of neural networks.
Since 1987, this research team (located at the
Department of Psychology,
University of Amsterdam)
had developed several such software applications.
Currently the research team is working on the
Walnut Neurosimulation system, which is based on a set of standards that
consists of a neural network markup language (NNML), a set of libraries
(in C++) and a development shell (Nutshell).
Nutshell is a scriptable application that runs under Windows 98.
It allows creation, manipulation and visualization of neural network
architectures and simulations.
The research is part of a PIONIER grant, sponsored by the
Netherlands Organisation for Scientific
Research (NWO) and
University of Amsterdam.
The research team includes members from psychology, neuroscience and
mathematics.
My job, together with two fellow programmers, was completing the
design and implementation of the system and coordinating the distribution
via the Internet (Open Source),
and so I did:
Walnut/Nutshell.
From September 2002 to May 2007, I worked as a Unix and Linux (Red Hat) system administrator and Oracle DBA at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.
May 2007, I started working at my current employer, the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute (KNMI) as a Unix system administrator.
August 2008, the 8th (yes, that's 2008-08-08), I married:
Shoes Declaration of Dependence
![[Shoes Declaration of Dependence - 2008-08-08]](http://pobox.com/~e.maryniak/images/shoes-declaration-of-dependence-480x320.jpg)
www.SpontaneFotografie.nl
Apart from netsurfing, preferably on a Linux box, hmmm, let me think ...!
My favourite quote comes from the "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" and I seriously suspect Douglas Adams, an enthusiastic Mac user, is referring to Microsoft products:
It is very easy to be blinded to the essential uselessness of them by the sense of achievement you get from getting them to work at all. In other words---and this is the rock-solid principle on which the whole of the Corporation's Galaxywide success is founded---their fundamental design flaws are completely hidden by their superficial design flaws.
From: "So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish". Douglas Adams.
Since the invention of bookmark files, most of my favorite links have moved there! Besides, I don't want to bother you with the zillionth list to a list of metalists. So, I'll just give you these few:
One of the things I enjoyed a lot on the Web, were the Travels with Samantha, with beautiful jpeg-ed photographs taken by the author, Philip Greenspun.
People often ask me about my last name, which is
Maryniak.
It is Polish in origin: however, I am a 100% Dutch ('Hollands'),
not Polish.
I changed my name (when I was 22) from "Albers" (no, not "Alberts") to
"Maryniak", due to the fact that my mother had remarried.
Thus I was named "Eric Albers" first and from my 22nd "Eric Maryniak".
My last name is often misspelled. And my first name, too, for that matter:
it is Eric and not "Erik".
Of course, Eric's are the real ones:
Eric de Noorman ;-)
Common misspellings of my last name are:
I do not know if there is a genealogy page on either "Albers" or "Maryniak". If you are interested in such matters (or my family relationships, for that matter), I have to refer you to public databases (such as newspaper archives, records kept at the town hall, etc.). Because I value my own privacy, I respect those of others, too (having a public home page on the Internet World Wide Web may seem, ehm, contradictory, I realize ;-)
Linux: where do you want to go tomorrow?
There's no page like home page.
http://pobox.com/~e.maryniak/hithere.html