[seul-edu] Recent activity

[Michael A Hamblin <michaelh@utdallas.edu>]

Hi everyone,

I'm really excited to see the SEUL/edu list buzzing with activity again
:) I guess this would be a good time to come back out of the shadows and
reintroduce myself.

My name is Michael Hamblin, and I've been on the SEUL/edu list for a long
time. Not too long ago I was in High School, helping out as much as I
could supporting a lab of DOS/Win3.11 machines, and being generally very
thankful that we weren't using Windows 95 :) The freedom that Linux would
have afforded us then if Linux was as developed then as it is today. A lot
of people think that Linux is too hard to install, etc. To a large extent
I agree with them, but on the other hand they've never had to format 
and reload a lab of 20 machines with DOS, Windows 3.11, Office, Turbo
Pascal, and QuickBasic from a sea of floppy disks :)

Since I graduated I've held a number of jobs all of which involved Unix
work or Unix support in one way or another. I often bemoaned the lack of
instruction we got in high school in this and other areas. Knowledge
hungry students had to come up with all sorts of clever ways to satisfy
their cravings. A lot of kids were pirating games, I was trying to get my
hands on OS/2 Connect, Novell Netware, and so on. Linux and Unix was out
of the question at the high school back then. Though I felt handicapped
and indeed cheated by the educational establishment, I didn't let it stop
me, especially when hardware prices started freefalling :)

In more recent days I am a student and full-time support at the University
of Texas at Dallas. The proliferation of Linux, particularly in the
Engineering/Computer Science department, is striking considering the
subtle anti-Linux attitude. That is changing slowly for the better. I am
also the President of the Linux User Group at UTD, however in recent days
I have been forced by time constraints to pass the torch on to the
knowledgable and capable Stephen Quam who you all recognize as one of the
folks working with the Quiz system here on SEUL/edu :) I am busy working
on a very interesting new project that I wish I could talk more about...

The Windows X Server problem is one of the most annoying problems
currently around, with solutions eluding even your state-run
universtities. Short of buying extremly expensive liscences for Exceed, or
aquiring MI/X (I have an old copy I downloaded back in the day, though it
really is trash and only useful in emergencies), the best option I have
found is simply to give up and install a small Linux partition with X. I
would have thought that by now someone would have ported one of the Xfree
servers to Windows :)

--
Michael Hamblin            http://www.utdallas.edu/~michaelh/
michaelh@utdallas.edu      http://www.ductape.net/
UTD Linux User Group       Engineering and Computer Science Support, x2997
                           "Welcome to the rest of your life" --Stavesacre