What I Really Do - Who I Really Am

Why is my sailboat named S/V Mother of Perl? Because I fell in love with Perl in the early 1990s, back when working for BYTE Magazine . My colleagues used to make fun of me because I had left the one, true programming language 'C' for some hacker's scripting language. When they found out I was building a boat, they joked "whatya gonna call it? Mother of Perl?" There you have the story.

Believe it or not, I was introduced to Perl by Larry Wall and Tom Christiansen while interviewing them at a USENIX conference. I knew Larry because of some of his earlier work: in particular patch. I solicited articles about Perl from Larry.

Besides the work I did with Perl at BYTE, I have built two large applications: a network printing system for a New England mega-hospital (based loosely on a similar system built at MIT), and a commercial, Webinterfaced, mail-forwarding system. I also worked at Digital (aka, Compaq, now HP) in the High Performance Systems Evaluation Laboratory porting SPEC95 benchmarks from UNIX to VMS. The SPEC95 benchmark harness is written in Perl. The Perl work that I do for CCOM is mainly centered around binary data conversion. ('C' isn't the only language for this kind of thing.)

I have had more than 100 articles published in BYTE and other magazines and journals. I have also had two UNIX books published by Sams Press.

I hope to be able to contribute my experience in binary data conversion using Perl, as well as my client/server experience. Perhaps through tutorials.