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redbrick.dcu.ie/~werdz

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Who are you? What are you doing here?

I'm Andrew, a graduate of Computer Applications (Software Engineering) and a (hopefully) soon-to-graduate Masters student of Forensics and Security, both at DCU. I spend far too much time tinkering with Linux, Solaris, OpenBSD and FreeBSD machines - mostly on Redbrick, but there are others. I also write large amounts of mostly useless code in languages such as Python, Perl, JavaScript, C and even a little bit of Java and Objective-C. In short, I like tinkering with computers, big and little.

I was a Redbrick System Administrator during the 2007/08 and 2009/10 academic years, and Webmaster during the 2008/09 year. Unfortunately most of 2008/09 was spent cleaning up after a hack during the previous summer, and then moving the web server (this one) from a slow (but lovely to work with) Ubuntu Linux (x86) machine to a massively powerful Solaris 10 (UltraSPARC T1) machine, complete with the usual Solaris-related fangs and claws. This meant that there wasn't a lot of time to work on the actual website.

Code

RBVM

RBVM is the frontend that is being used to manage virtual machines on Redbrick's VM server, Daniel. It's written completely in Python and currently uses Linux KVM as a hypervisor, although it could be fairly easily adapted to some other system. It's still got a long way to go, but it's definitely getting there.

Source code can be accessed at a Mercurial repository here.

RSPM

RSPM (Redbrick Solaris Package Manager) is a fairly ugly mass of perl that currently keeps packages on Redbrick's web server up to date. It's most useful function is to provide an indication that a package might require an update (although it should by no means be trusted exclusively, as it's prone to break horribly if an upstream vendor makes a major change to their website design).

This is really one of those things that, if I had time, I'd completely re-implement in nice clean object-oriented Python, and maybe take a different approach to entirely.

Download the source code here. Documentation is available here.

Market Analysis System

For my final year project I wrote a highly flexible and adaptable system to help web store managers to get an overview of the market they're in, what their competitors are up to, and how competitive they are at any given time. It provides real-time access to this information via an easy-to-use web interface. If anyone is interested in such a system they should contact me (see below).

Other Sites

I have a blog, and a twitter account that I update somewhat regularly. I also occasionally visit Server Fault. I also write little howtos here every now and again.

Other People

A few others have sites on Redbrick and other places, some big, some small. In no particular order, sites with actual content in bold:

angelkat receive lil_cain johan revenant train phaxx coconut d_fens hurl haus

Contact Me

You can contact me via e-mail at werdz <át> redbrick.dcu.ie - excuse the accented a, it was to confuse spam robots. I also have a Skype account; my username is werdz1.

Colours borrowed from the Redbrick homepage and Tango Desktop Project.

File information: $Id: index.html,v 1.6 2010/09/04 19:37:46 werdz Exp $

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