About Satya

Updated: March 2008

This is old stuff. Old, old, stuff. Sure, I'm a programmer/sysadmin type person. I usually work on Linux and build web-based applications. In my spare time I play games and write programs. I do have a life but I don't want to go into that on my public web site. I'm not a 14-year-old myspace user.

This page seriously needs a changelog.

Current news: (my blog is always more up-to-date than this) I'm working on perl, general linux-y stuff, jabber-based technologies, and general web-based stuff like CGI scripts with templates, CSS, and so on. It seems I've become the maintainer of mySiteMaker, too.

I know several programming languages. I know that ancient dinosaur, GW-Basic. Yes, I know, the rage now is Java and Visual <anything>, but I learnt on GWBasic, and I still remember it. I did start on Visual Basic 3 at one point, and wrote one or two programs which are available in the downloads section. I gave up on VB, I'm sticking with cross-platform things like C and Perl. I started using Turbo Pascal in 1996, but now I do C. ANSI C, at that. On Linux. Boggled the profs in college, who didn't know that I was sitting at the only Linux box in the lab. That's old news, too. Now I do Rails. I did Perl for a few years, still do, but after using Ruby on Rails, Perl is too clunky for web apps.

I know a little Javascript. I wrote these pages using pico only but now I'm all about vim. I don't use fancy HTML editors, because I prefer to write my own code and hate the mess they make. But if you want a decent IDE, try Netbeans.

I started learning C because that's the foundation for all the rest of it -- for Perl, CGI scripting, and of course C++ and Java (I've been told that there are enough differences between C and C++ for them to qualify as separate languages. Now I'm learning compilers, and I know they're separate). (I have no idea what that was about.)

Besides, C Programming was an entire subject in the 4th semester. And after learning VB and Oracle (under Unix, and Developer 2000) I think C++ isn't too difficult. I've been doing Perl since before 1999, and it is easy. Especially if you know C. Now I try to do everything in Perl. Most of it has been on my own machine but I've got a few scripts online. Some of my scripts are available on the downloads page. Besides, there's all the work stuff, most of which is behind logins, and this isn't a résumé.

I know a little PHP as well. So, to summarize: Perl, C, PHP, Linux, Apache, MySQL, basic shell scripting, HTML, Ruby on Rails, a little XML, a little Jasper Reports, and Javascript. That changes over time, and my résumé usually has the latest and greatest. I deny all knowledge of Unidata.

Around March 1999, some of the Mumbai engineering colleges held a techfest called 360 degrees - Encompassing the Horizon. This was done by the IEEE student chapters of the respective colleges. Besides doing the code for the online registration forms, I was one of the judges for the event called Explorer. This was a website design contest. A photograph later appeared on my hard drive:

In October 1999, I organised the quiz contest for the IEEE-TSEC techfest "ISAAC". No photos of that are available.

So here's what I do: (no particular order)

• C/C++ (dabbled a little) since 1998, now I'm much better at C after all the programming I did in CS565 (compilers) and CS551 (Computer Communications)
• Perl (dabbled a lot) since ~1999 — I do Perl scripting for CGI. Here are my JAPHs, and here's a Mumbai bus guide that's outdated.
• I do open source stuff:
  • mySiteMaker maintainer
  • mod_auth_any and authClient maintainer
  • Saccs personal accounting system (a glorified notebook) maintainer
  • PCJBot, a jabber bot written using Perl Object Execution (POE) (POE::Component::Jabber, hence PCJ) — I started it with lots of help from other people.
• Ruby on Rails, the latest fad. (March 2008)
• HTML since ~1997
• I do a little modelling. Plastic scale models of aircraft, vehicles, and so on. And trains. Photos are available.
• I play lots of games. Nothing mainstream, more like Pardus, OpenTTD, Traffic Giant, various casual web games, and so on. (as of early 2008)

Pictures

• San Fransisco trip Dec 2001
• Disneyworld May 2004
• West North Carolina, Great Smoky Mountains national park and railroad, April 2005

Livejournals and blogs are fashionable these days (i.e. 2002). I have an archive of my livejournal, since I roll my own blog now.
I had my own blosxom-based blog, which has now been replaced with a home-grown solution that works a bit like blosxom. But it's my own code, and caters to my needs. I must publish it some time.