About
Content
My name is Marius and I’m a Systems Administrator, Engineer and Developer living in Germany. On the internet, I am better known as devilx, 0×90 or sometimes even [0x[90]| (I came up with that nick when I wanted to register on a board on which the nick devilx has already been taken. The nick is a combination of the the hexadecimal-code 0×90 and some random characters to make it look more 31337 ;) 0×90 is a NOP). In spite of spending over 90% of my live in the areas near Stuttgart, I was actually born in Romania, near Brasov in a city called Zarnesti. When I was around two years old, my parents just moved from Romania to Germany, so I didn’t really experience much of my homeland.
“May I never be complete. May I never be content. May I never be perfect.”
– Tyler Durden, Fight Club
My favorite occupation is and always has been sitting in front of the computer, writing code and exploring its possibilities. Besides of that, I like playing Crossgolf, all kind of card and board games and going out with friends. Also, I love music and I’m listening to it whenever I can. My favorite music-genres are House, Drum and Bass and other electronic music in general, french Rap and spanish Hip Hop – but I also listen to other genres if I like the songs. Since I was a four-years-old kid, my father taught me to play the piano and got me a feeling for tunes and rhythm, I guess. Now, I still make music myself: I’m a very interested and passionate hobby DJ. I own a turntable-set and *some* vinyls, and I also do a lot of software DJ-ing. I’ve already mixed-down some pieces out of which two have been played on the Funk/House channel of a pretty well-known german internet radio-station called #Musik (RauteMusik) and another one at a lounge in Stuttgart-Plieningen called Sunset.
“Dancing is the vertical expression of the horizontal desire.”
– Unknown
Beside my interests into computers, listening and producing music, I’m also very fascinated of cars. I adore vehicles like the Toyota Supra MK4, the Acura/Honda NSX, the Nissan Skyline and also old americans like the 1992 Pontiac Firebird or the 1971 Dodge Challenger.
“First man, then machine.”
– Honda
When I was about 13 years old I started programming in Visual Basic 4 on a Pentium 1 with 133 MHz. This was my first contact with software development… even if I wouldn’t call it “development” what I did, heh. One year later, I got a new computer which really was a “high-end-machine” then ago: AMD K6-2 450 MHz, Elsa Winner 1000/T3D, 64 Mb PC 133 RAM and a Soundblaster sound-card. After I got bored writing dumb VB applications on my brand new computer, I just discovered something new for me. I didn’t hear about it before and my first thought was “Ough, what a crap?!” – Linux.
My first Linux was something called “easyLinux” (this distro doesn’t exist anymore, and nowadays I know why, heh) which I got from the homonymous german computer magazine. However, I remember that I inserted the disc into my CD-ROM drive, restarted my computer and saw an installation tool starting … “Penguin?! Wtf?!“, I was thinking in the first moment. Then the setup-manager explained to me, what I was about to do. I continued the installation till a message-box popped up, which told me that the setup-manager is just going to format my whole drive… nice. Immediately I pressed the Restart-button of my computer, ejected the CD and did not touch it again for a couple of months.
After the boredom of Windows annoyed me more and more, I decided to backup everything I needed (at that time on about 30 floppy-disks) and install easyLinux. I survived the setup-manager, Linux booted up and a pretty nice new Desktop welcomed me – KDE. As far as I remember it was a two-point-o’ version, but I’m not sure. However, I started working with Linux and learning about the system. Because of the fact that I hadn’t any internet connectivity at that time, I was not able to upgrade packages – actually I didn’t even know that it’s possible to do that…
“The more I learn, the more I learn how little I know.”
– Socrates
Some months later, I read something about a “SuSE Linux” in a german computer magazine called “Computer-Bild” (yes, I was young and stupid… ). I went to the local library and borrowed the latest version… I think it was a six-point-something. I was very surprised how “easy” the installation of that Linux distro was, compared to the easyLinux. I decided to call it the distro I would use from then on.
By the time passing, I also got internet connectivity someday. As far as I remember it was a 14k analog modem. Browsing the internet was real fun and updating packages even more. I decided to stop spending hours downloading one package, instead I started monitoring all kind of news-feeds, at that time mostly KDE-related stuff. Some months later, I updated to SuSE 7.3 Professional, which shipped containing some very thick books (yay, free papers!).
What I liked in SuSE was the setup- and configuration-manager YaST. It was just as simple as on Windows to configure the system (okay, maybe not that simple.. but still!). With SuSE 7.3 I got more and more interested in the programming-language C++ and started learning it for about half a year. After that time, I dismissed it. The main reason for this was the fact, that more than 90% of the System was written in C, so that learning C++ seemed pretty useless to me, then ago. So, I switched from learning C++ to learning C. Some people may now say that it was a step backwards, but I didn’t and still don’t think so.
However, after I more and more got along with Linux, its applications and C, I started leaving KDE and trying something out that was called GNU Network Object Model Environment – GNOME. As far as I remember, GNOME 1.4 was shipped with SuSE 7.3. It was ugly. But I decided to use it, because it was mostly written in C and didn’t produce that many … crashed and caused Signal 11 (SIGEGV) as KDE did. Again, some of you might call this a step backwards… well.. it could be, heh.
“A program isn’t debugged until the last user is dead.”
– Unknown
When SuSE released their 8.0 version, I bought it and updated my 7.3 system. The same I did, when 8.1 hit the market. My main problem with SuSE was, that it was too much into KDE/Qt. There weren’t many GNOME/GTK-packages on the SuSE CDs, and even those ones which were available, were outdated. At this time my internet connection got upgraded to 56k. I was happy about that, but I couldn’t really benefit from it, because I still could not perform updates for big gnome-packages.
A few weeks later then, I ordered a broadband connection at a well-known ISP and a Debian GNU/Linux Woody CD-set at an online shop. I tested Debian and also some other distros (Red Hat, Mandrake, etc.) out for a while, and I noticed that my AMD K6 just became really old. At least for the software these distros where shipping (like for example OpenOffice.org), so: Let’s buy a new one! After some months of searching, hard and much working and saving money, I finally found the computer I wanted: An Intel Pentium 4 3,2GHz HT with 1024 MB RAM and all the fancy new stuff that was available then ago.
“If I wanted to crash my system by randomly upgrading to unstable builds of gcc and glibc and obscure unofficial kernel patches I would deserve gentoo.”
– Andrew “ajgenius” Johnson, #gnome-art
While switching from distro to distro and from operating system to operating system (Linux, BSD, BeOS, …), I kept on learning C and also got interested into other languages like PHP or C#. It was a real advantage to know C before occupying with these languages because C makes you really understand how a language works, and what’s even more important, how the operating system handles applications and memory. C teaches you how different interfaces can be used and what risks a sloppy-written program can bring with it.
A few years ago, I’ve started my profession as freelancer for different companies, internet-projects and even individuals. Today I earn my crust as IT Specialist, focused on Linux infrastructures. My knowledge spreads from standard server implementations, over individual solutions up to programming at different levels – from the system to the web. My toolset nowadays contains of some piece of hardware running Mac OS X, bundled with applications like Terminal and TextMate.
In open-source, I did quite some work until I totally lost most of my free time on my job and my amazing girl. I was administrating and moderating different OSS projects (e.g. gDesklets and Gnome-Art, to name some) and also launched my own software-projects (for more information, take a look at my projects site). My software was usually written in C, but these days I’ve been also working with C# on Mono and sometimes also write some C++, though I dislike it. For everything else I could not implement using any of these languages, I mostly made use of PHP and/or Bash-scripting.
However, if you didn’t fall asleep until yet, I can congratulate you – you’ve now reached the last few lines of my story. I guess, I’m just going to stop here and let the future decide what might come next. :-) If you would like to make an inquiry or give me feedback, please feel free to contact me. I hope you enjoyed reading.
Programming/Scripting
- C
- C++ (at least the basics)
- C#
- QuickBasic, Visual Basic and VBA/VBS
- PHP4/5 with MySQL
- JavaScript (basics)
- Shell (bash)
Operating Systems
- Linux (SuSE, RedHat, Mandrake, Debian, Gentoo, Vida, and some more)
- Unix (FreeBSD, OpenBSD, basic knowledge)
- Mac OS X (10.4, 10.5)
- Windows (3.1, 95, 98, Me, NT4, 2k, XP and a little bit of Vista)
- Why the “FM”?
Well, the picture originated at night, while I was waiting in my car. I played a bit around with my then ago Motorola RAZR v3i mobile phone and tested out how the cam’s picture quality was at night. The “FM” was standing on my headunit’s display and I photographed it. :-)
