I am your friendly neighborhood Linux-guru and have over the years acquired decent knowledge in a broad area of topics. Although there is little time for it, I run my own company for various freelance projects. So if you think I might find your project interesting and want to hire me, drop me a line.

Web-related things

• I run my own server, split into several virtual machines using Xen. This my playground where I host twenty-something websites and all kinds of applications for my own use.
• I am familiar with the setup and administration of serveral open-source content managment systems and wiki engines and I run several sites with the following ones. I also know about their APIs for themes and plugins.
  • Drupal
  • Joomla!
  • MoinMoin
  • MediaWiki
  • Wordpress
• (X)HTML and CSS I know too. Although I am able to create designs from scratch, I prefer to use open-source layouts as a basis for own modifications.
• I can write custom web-applications using both PHP and, preferably, Python.
• I can plug those into web servers and know how to configure the latter. I mainly use Apache, but have tried out alternatives like lighttpd or cherrypy.
• I administer over a dozen domain names plus sub-domains.

System administration

• Since 1999 I run my own computers exclusively on Debian GNU/Linux and I have gathered extensive knowledge on the internals of UNIX-type operating systems and on how to use them to provide various services.
• Email. I am familiar with the postfix and exim MTAs and the setup and running of the list-management software Mailman. I can administer non-trivial mail setups with MX-records, run IMAP(S) servers and handle email sorting with Procmail and spam-filtering with Spamassassin.
• SSH. I use remote administration on the command line on a daily basis. In additon, I know how to use SSH for tunneling and secure port forwarding. I generally prefer the command line to clicking around.
• Yes, I know networking and firewall setups too, but have never gotten down to the details of TCP/IP communication.
• Databases. I know SQL and have used MySQL, Postgresql and SQlite for various projects, both web-based and off-line.

Other programming

• Python is my language of choice. If I must, I can write PHP, Perl, C, C++ and probably some language I forgot.
• I use git for version control; also still subversion sometimes.
• Through my astronomy work, I am quite familiar with the numerical, scientific and visualization extensions for Python. Have at look at my page on github for a few examples.
• I have extended the reduction pipeline for the scientific spectrograph HARPS (also in Python) to handle polarization data.
• In general, I am used to automating operations on large data sets.
• (more when I remember it...)

Teaching

I have pedagogical education for university level teaching and taught several astronomy classes. In addition, I have voluntarily given seminars on modern computing tools that are useful to fellow scientists. Public lectures, from astronomy to statistics, have also been on the agenda.

All of above are merely examples, so feel free to ask me about your topic of interest.