I've been on the Internet in some form or other since about 1989. Here's some of my past electronic life...

Deron was here ;-)

I've been on the Internet in some form or other since about 1989. That was before web browsers, search engines, ISPs, and way before dot-coms and spam. It was also before anybody was aware that what they said online would be archived and become part of permament history for all to see decades later. So here's some interesting little snippits of early Internet history where I've left my mark. Mostly useless and insignificant, but fun vanity for me anyways.

  • NetHack Guidebook (PDF) I appear as a small footnote in an appendix while I was helping with the Amiga port of this game. But it's mirrored all over the world and is my most widespread reference. (See also nethack.org)
  • deb.org (AIP) This 1994 mail was in search of me after I dropped off a Deborah Gibson unofficial fan club mailing list without unsubscribing. How rude of me.
  • RFC 1340 (1992) Contact [DXM4] for Enterprise Number 363 (a very low early number as of today). Also appears in RFC 1700.
  • IANA PEN Also registrant of Enterprise Number 7423 for medplus.com
  • CVS mailing list Just answering simple questions way back in 1996.
  • comp.sys.amiga.programmer Discussing memory collescing for the Amiga computer way back in 1991. Also for fun, more Amgia postings about Exec memory allocation and even 68000 assembly for RomTags (Amiga's version of "plug-n-play").
  • comp.std.c Providing ANSI C conformance explanation in 1991, not long after the C language was standardized.
  • comp.sys.hp.hpux Discussing modem hell on HP Unix servers.

My first open source?

My first open source project? Okay, this is funny. Back in 1991 I apparently had written a program for the Amiga to allow it to communicate over the serial port with Unix terminals and "released it" for the public. But I can't remember ever writing it, nor do I have the source code. If anybody finds it, please send me a copy.

Open source participation

This section lists some of the ways I've helped other projects and Open Source activities. A very small effort in the big picture, but everybody's small efforts help the entire Open Source and Free Software communities. I encourge you to participate as well.

My patches

Documentation

My Red Hat Linux bugs

See redhat.com. Bugs I've reported or commented on.

  • 150645 parted can't repair or reformat a corrupted partition table during install
  • 90159 fwrite() returns EIO on fast NFS-client writing to slow server
  • 88047 /proc/<pid>/cmdline is empty in RHL8
  • 88010 GDB unable to debug apache 2.0.44

My Python bugs

See python.org and the python sourceforge project page.

My Apache bugs

See apache.org. Bugs I've reported.

  • MODPYTHON-62 local_ip in connection object returns remote_ip instead.
  • MODPYTHON-64 local_addr broken under IPv6, patch provided.

My Mozilla bugs

See mozila.org. Bugs I've reported or commented on.

  • 68877 HELO domain of sending mail account should be HELO hostname
  • 141656 Transparent image pixels print white instead of background
  • 184005 Tooltip text erases part of fixed absolute positioned image, repaint is failing
  • 184008 z-index randomly ignored when overlaying fixed absolute image
  • 188265 Cursor down arrow key moves up to start of quoted block rather than to next line
  • 220833 View page info/forms shows id, not name attribute

My GCC bugs

See gcc.gnu.org. Bugs I've reported or commented on:

  • Bug 10666 undefined ATTRIBUTE_NULL_PRINTF_3 [2003]
  • optimization/7281 Internal compiler error in reload_cse_simplify_operands on HP PA-RISC 2.0 [2002]
  • bootstrap/4768 gencodes core dumps under 64-bit HP-UX because of alloca prototype [2001]
  • libstdc++/61 Conflicting types for nan() during installation [2000]
  • Nov1996 fixincludes broken under HP-UX 10.20, gcc won`t build [1996]

W3C Validators

  • 200302-0031 Sample HTML for validator icons is not XHTML

GNU Bash shell bugs

  • Mar1999 User tilde expansion core dump under HP-UX with NIS (version 2.03)

GNU tar bugs

  • Jun1994 GNU tar 1.11.2 doesn't handle hard-linked directories

Tcl/Tk bugs

Yes, I used Tcl before Python came along and showed me a better way.

  • Sep1996 Tcl 7.6b1 and HP-UX bug in FCmd and the fix