Hi there, and welcome to my blog.

I started writing this a long, long time ago, before anyone had even heard of blogs. The word blog and the concept of a weblog was not very mainstream at the time, so this used to be called “kerneljack’s ramblings” for a long time. I decided to write this diary after being inspired by a few other similar pages I had started to see around the internet at that time (1999).

One of these inspirations was a diary page put up by some programmers at RedHat who are quite famous for their free software contributions: Federico Mena Quintero (Eye of Gnome and many, other things), Owen Taylor (Pango), and of course, Carsten Haitzler (of Enlightenment fame). Note that the page I linked to is from the Wayback Machine, so many links don’t work anymore.

As you may have already guessed, I’m heavily into Free / Open Source software. I do use Windows of course, I like to keep an open mind and I like to see how different people solve the same kind of problems.

Flight Simulator, back in the day

I started messing around with computers in mid-1990 or so. I have always loved airplanes and I was sure that I wanted to be either a pilot or a doctor (I was good at biology). One day I visited a friend of mine and he showed me his new 80286 computer. This didn’t spark much interest from me at all, until he loaded up Bruce Artwick’s Flight Simulator! I was totally hooked! I couldn’t stop flying that thing. MS-DOS was quite common at that time, and he showed me some commands and what they could do to directories and files, etc. I was not interested. I wanted to fly! My dad saw me using the flight simulator and saw how excited I was. Looking back, I suppose I wouldn’t buy my child a computer just to help him learn to fly, but I think my dad knew that ultimately I would become interested in other things. He obviously knew that computers were important and that more and more people were using them everyday. So he bought me one.

Lotus 1-2-3 by Lotus Software

I was ecstatic, the only thing I wanted to make sure of when buying it, was “did the shopkeeper include Flight Simulator with it or not”. I brought it home, and, believe it or not, that was the first time in my life that I didn’t sleep until quite late at night! I got interested in other things eventually, and my dad encouraged me to learn how to use lots of business software like Lotus 1-2-3 and Harvard Graphics.

I started to get interested in how the computer worked, and decided to learn as much as I could. Of course, I had to take some bold steps first. So I formatted it Great. I was stuck with a dead PC and didn’t know how to recover, so it was back to the shop and once I saw how the guy fixed it (just copy COMMAND.COM to the right place), I never had to go back again. I formatted it several times, and installed PC-DOS, DR-DOS, even OS/2 after a few years of tinkering. I learned GW-BASIC and Microsoft’s QuickBasic.

Microsoft’s GW-Basic and Borland’s Turbo C compiler

After that summer I went back to school (9th grade) and I knew more about computers than *anyone* there. Over the next summer I taught myself C, and have been in love with it ever since. I’ve been doing mostly Java stuff for many years now, but I have always yearned to get back to C, even Assembly if I have to. I learned that on my own as well, back in 1993 or so. I like working close to the machine, at the lower level.

So that’s how it all started. I went on to get Bachelors and Masters degrees in Software Engineering and nowadays I spend my time doing programming of some kind, or System / Network administration at the place I work.

I used Windows and DOS exclusively for many years (1990-1997) and somehow, while at University my curiosity led me to Linux. I can’t recall how or where I heard of it, but I was always really interested in OSes so I decided to give it a try. I didn’t know there was a huge online community around it (around 1997-1998), so I went to a bookstore and they had a *huge* book that came with a CD of Yggdrasil Linux. I think this was a Slackware based distro. I tried it, but didn’t like it at first because I couldn’t do anything with it. A lot of the hardware in my computer just didn’t work. So I went back to Windows.

A year later I tried again, this time with Redhat Linux and was pleased that it was so much better. I don’t remember exactly, but I think I was using some flavor of KDE at that time, but I can’t be sure. I found the idea behind Free / Open source software to be very appealing and nowadays I use a mixture of OSes, including Mac OSX, everyday.

As you may have guessed, I came up with my nickname kerneljack because of my love of OSes. The “kernel” is one of the most basic things in an OS, it handles all the housekeeping chores that an operating system needs to do like allocating memory and scheduling processes. So when I needed to come up with a nickname I thought “kernel” was cool, and I simply added “jack” just to complete the name. I’ve used it ever since.

Hope you enjoy the blog, and I hope you find a solution to a problem that may have been bothering you. I do try to post solutions to problems from time to time.

Thanks for visiting.