Versiunea in romana
Pseudo-resume
This is my profile on LinkedIn with professional endorsements and references.
This is not a proper resume. It's just stuff that i did because i liked it.
It contains things done for my employers (and in school), but also things
that i did on my own.
I put all these things here so that, if you are interested in similar
stuff, we could perhaps find something to discuss about, beyond the usual
"how was your weekend" or "how's your family". :-) Think about it as just
something that a geek says to other geeks.
In high-school (and actually even before that) i started to play with
analog electronics. In the beginning i was mostly interested in various
automatizations and things like that, and also in radio-frequency. But most
of my efforts and study related to analog electronics were directed to sound and music:
amplifiers, pre-amps, cassette players, etc.
I also paid some attention to acoustics, speakers design, etc. I'm still
very interested in that subject.
Around the same time, i got interested in physics and
chemistry. The former caught my attention mainly with electricity things (van
der Graaf generators, Tesla coils...) and optics (telescopes). The latter...
well, let's say i like things that go "boom!" :-)
I'm still interested in electricity and high-voltage stuff. If i get some
time (which is unlikely) i'd like to play with a Tesla coil. Any suggestions
are appreciated. I'm also interested in chatting about high-voltage
experiments.
Probably the most important thing that happened in the same period is that i
got interested in computers. Back then, computers were 3.5 MHz, 64kB RAM, no
hard-drive things. :-) Yeah, those were the days.
I vaguely learned some Fortran, which i never mastered with any
reasonable degree of confidence. But i programmed quite a few things in
Basic.
Among the things i did then with computers were some physics programs,
such as trajectories in non-uniform gravity fields, waves in unidimensional
media, and such. Oh yeah, and i played games, lots of games. :-)
In college i mostly developed further the subjects already started.
I learned digital electronics and i actually played with it a lot.
Combined with analog electronics and sound processing, it made for lots of fun
hours with digital filters and analog/digital and digital/analog conversion.
I even attempted to build a small synthesizer (with polyphony and everything)
but that project never got completed. Instead, i took only a piece of it (one
"voice") and transformed it into a sound card for pre-PC computers; i also
wrote drivers for it in Zilog assembly and a sound management application in
Pascal.
Basically, the most complex things i did with digital electronics were
systems with microprocessors, or small computers, depending on how you look
at them. I used to know Zilog assembly pretty well back then.
I continued to play with analog electronics, almost exclusively in the field of sound and music, HiFi equipments, etc.
This was when i started to work with PCs, first with Microsoft and Novell
stuff, then with Linux. I wrote a whole lot of physics programs, mostly in
the field of simulations, almost everything was done in Basic and Pascal.
I also played with the OSs and the network, did quite a bit of
low-level stuff (such as twisting the MS-DOS filesystem with DiskEdit, or
adding hooks to the DOS interrupts to hijack important functions of the
system).
After college i did some sysadmin and programming stuff for a while.
Then i went to the Internet service providers business and spent there a few
years as well. Then briefly worked for a software company. Then i came to
work for my current employer.
All that is better covered by my proper resume - essentially, what i did
was things related to Internet services, network architecture and security.
Probably most of the fun came from the security stuff, which i'm doing
full-time for several years now, but was present partially even before.
I did some 3D modelling, using tools such as POVRay (on Linux) and 3D Studio (on Windows). I was less interested in aesthetical considerations (although i did try to make nice 3D scenes) but more interested in using the modellers to explore mathematical or physical problems; especially a realistic raytracer such as POVRay is invaluable for such pursuits. A tiny leftover from that period is the nice spinning cube that you can see on every page in my website.
At some point i became interested in voice-over-IP and video-over-IP, i played with several videoconferencing tools, such as CuSeeMe, and i was able to demonstrate that it's actually possible to send voice over a network using just basic (non-multimedia) Unix tools such as netcat and gzip.
I continued to be interested in music, sound and multimedia in general. Especially in recent days, since PCs became powerful enough, doing multimedia on computers (or computer-aided) is actually fun. :-) I'm currently playing with software and hardware synthesizers, sequencers, digital recorders and other kinds of music gear, and i'm exploring DVD authoring and, in general, creating complex multimedia content.
Well, so that's it. If you're interested in similar things, let me know. Perhaps we can have a talk.