Roland's Homepage

My random knot in the Web

Location: homepage

Introduction

Welcome to my homepage.

It contains everything you didn't want to know about me, and maybe even some useful links.

If you need to contact me, you can find my e-mail address on the bottom of each page.

Quick links

Pages linked from this one;

All the material that has recently changed on this page will be indicated with a red stripe on the left side of the text.

Due to the amount of spam I receive, I have been filtering my mail. If you're trying to reach me by mail and you do not get a response, this might be causing it. Read all about it on my spam blocking page.

All my web pages have been converted to XHTML 1.0. The nxml-mode for emacs helps me with writing valid XHTML. Additionally, the pages are periodically being run through the online validator.

Why? Because of software patents.

Fortunately the European Parliament listened to the citizens it represents and rejected software patents.

But remember that the price of freedom is eternal vigilance.

The big corporations that want software patents (to provide entry barriers to their markets, IMHO) will undoubtedly try again.

About me.

Work

I am a mechanical engineer (B.Sc.) by training, educated at the Hogeschool Brabant (Hogeschool Midden-Brabant, in those days) and currently working at Philips Medical Systems, as a production engineer with the Liquid Resin Systems department. My main responsibilities are designing, prototyping and troubleshooting the production of parts made from composite materials. Composites in this case are carbon- aramid- or glass-fibers combined with resins and foam cores to form strong, stiff and lightweight parts.

Hobbies

Reading is my favorite hobby. Especially Science Fiction, historical and adventure novels.

When I'm not doing that I'm probably fiddling with my computer. Installing and trying new software, and writing it consume lots of my free time, next to surfing the Web. And maintaining this homepage.

One of the things I like to do with the computer is creating images with the aid of a ray-tracer. I've gathered some of the images I've made on my raytracing page.

If the weather is fine, I like to take the motorbike out for a spin, or tour around on my bicycle.

On my computer, I keep the SETI@home client running in the background. SETI is an effort to try and detect radio signals that might have been send by extraterrestrial intelligences from the background noise of the universe. The amounts of data gathered by radio telescopes is huge. So the people at SETI have chopped the data up into little pieces, and ask you to run a background program to help analyze that data one piece at a time.

My total credit is: 74,676.51, as of 2006-06-05.

A you can see above, I've finished a lot of work units since joining SETI@home on June 13th, 1999 . During that time, I've gone from an aging P150 through an Athlon 800 and later an Athlon 1400 to an Athlon64 3200+, and went from Linux kernel 2.0.x to 2.6.9 and currently to FreeBSD 6.1-STABLE amd64.

pictures

For my family, friends and other interested people (not likely, though :-), here are some pictures of my holidays and other events.

websurfing spots

You can find a list of places I tend to visit often in my bookmarks file.

Unix

I've been a user of the Linux operating system ever since I installed Slackware back in 1996. If you want to know more about this free software OS, take a look at my linux stuff page.

In 2004 I switched to FreeBSD when I installed it on my new Athlon64 box. Mainly because Slackware is not available in native mode for the AMD64 platform. I've found that FreeBSD performs very well and is easy and straightforward to configure. The documentation is also very good. The whole system is more integrated and polished than Linux. I have put up a FreeBSD stuff page for miscellaneous information about FreeBSD and my setup.

I have written some free software for FreeBSD & Linux. You can download it from my software page.

FreeBSD and Linux (or UNIX in general) have an austere reputation as a no frills server OS. But it's design makes it a very powerfull toolbox. It's tradition has an underlying philosophy which embodies "wisdom" gathered over the decades. Like all powerfull tools these give you enough rope to hang yourself with, but I have found that learning them is time well-spent. It is truly an enabling technology.

Nevertheless it can also be a nice desktop environment. See my desktop for example. But there is also XFCE, Gnome or KDE for those who like a more baroque style.

Miscellaneous

quotes

Over the years, I have gathered some quotes from usenet and the Web that I found deep and/or funny. You will find them on this page.

free speech

Free speech is one of the pillars of liberty. It is protected by article 19 of the universal declaration of human rights. Therefore I support the EFF's Blue Ribbon campaign.

privacy

Your (online) privacy is under threat. Lots of institutions (governmental and commercial) gather data about you, and are working to prevent citizens from using strong cryptography to guard their privacy. Support the EFF's Privacy Now campaign.

I believe that people should have access to strong cryptography software, to guard their privacy. I sign my mail messages with the aid of the GNU Privacy Guard (gpg) program.

If you want to check if a message was really sent by me, you can verify it with my public key. You will need gpg to do that.

If you use FreeBSD, Linux or any other UNIX-like system, you can compile gpg from source if it is not available in binary form for your OS. For those who use Windows, there is a set of pre-built binaries available from the gpg download page (or from the FTP site).

I have also written some programs that implement a one-time-pad encryption system. It is called onepad, and you can find it on my software page.