Scott Dowdle wrote:
Robert,
I've finished up the interview questions and you can find theme here:
http://www.montanalinux.org/files/robert-nelson-interview.html
*Who is Robert Nelson?*
/Please answer whatever questions you feel comfortable answering./
*Q:* Please tell me a little bit about yourself. Where are you from
(originally and now)? What is your educational background? What are your
hobbies? What is your family status (married, kids?)? What do you do for
a living?
I was born in Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada. Burnaby is a suburb of
Vancouver where Expo '86 was held. I spent most of my life living in
various cities all across Canada. In 1992 I moved to Seattle,
Washington in the United States to work at Microsoft. In 2004 I retired
from Microsoft and currently live in Bellevue, Washington a few miles
from the Microsoft Campus. My partner of 8 years and I don't have any
children but we have two miniature Dachshunds that think they are our
children.
Since retiring I've occupied my time managing my real estate investments
and contributing to open-source projects, programming is probably the
closest thing I have to a hobby :-). Most of the open-source projects
I've been involved with have been directly or indirectly related to my
business.
*Q:* How long have you been programming? What programming languages do
you use / prefer? Are there any other software projects you are / have
been involved with that you would like to mention?
I started programming in 1973 when I used to skip high school to sneak
off to Simon Fraser University to play with the IBM 370/155 mainframe.
I was around so much that they offered me a summer job developing
courses using a CAI language they developed as an extension to APL. So
my first languages were APL/CAI and CourseWriter III. From there I
branched into PL/1 and System 360 Assembler.
Over the years I've learned and programmed in pretty much every
programming language ever developed, including some oldies but goodies
like Fortran and Cobol (Somehow I missed out on Algol). Most of my
professional life has been spent programming in C/C++ and various
machine languages.
Lately I've been working a lot in Perl, PHP, Python and Shell scripts
because they are the primary languages used in open-source projects.
I don't really have any preferences regarding specific programming
languages, I believe that they are all just tools to get the job done.
Some are better suited for certain jobs than others but they all have
strengths and weaknesses.
Ever since I started playing with Actor (a defunct language, like
Smalltalk but with a syntax similar to C++ rather than Pascal), I found
I prefer object-oriented ones. I find that object-oriented programming
is the best way to organize my thoughts and make large projects more
manageable. Even when I'm using straight C code I still organize the
code as if I was writing C++.
For most of my career I've worked on system code, operating systems,
compilers and device drivers. When I was with Motorola I worked
primarily on proprietary and Unix SVR4 minicomputers. At Microsoft I
worked on the Interactive TV project, Windows CE and in the Windows NT
kernel group on the I/O subsystem and Plug and Play. Since leaving
Microsoft I've worked mainly on Linux. I avoid a religious attachment
to any platform, I feel that, like programming languages, each has its
own strengths and weaknesses. Sometimes I think that the acolytes on
all sides must be compensating for some physical shortcoming of their
own. :-)
The main open-source projects I've contributed to include Bacula, mtx,
FreePBX, and GForge. I've also contributed fixes to countless others.
I've contributed a few of the tools I've written to the open-source
community. Usually my involvement starts out with fixes for bugs that
hinder my use of the software. If there is some area that could be
improved to make the software much more useful for me then my
contribution might be larger. It really depends on my interest and how
easy it is to work with the other developers involved in the project.
But my involvement is usually selfish.
*Q:* How long have you been using OpenVZ? What other virtualization
products have you tried and do you use? What do you use OpenVZ for?
I've been using OpenVZ for over a year. My interest in virtualization
products sprang from my desire to get more use out of a dedicated server
I leased and my work on mtx (which I took over about a year or so ago)
which in turn was an offshoot of my involvement in Bacula. Both Bacula
and mtx required building and testing on a wide variety of operating
systems and versions. I found the process of installing and booting all
those operating systems tedious and was looking for a better solution
than filling my house with dedicated machines.
I started out with VMware. While it mostly met my needs, I prefer an
open-source solution
