The Story
My name is Marius M. M., on the internet better known as devilx 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 hexadecimal-code 0×90 and some random characters to make it look more 31337 😉 0×90 is a NOP).
I am German but I was born in Romania, near Brasov in a city called Zarnesti. When I was two years old, my parents just moved from Romania to Germany, so I didn’t really experience much of my homeland. In Germany, I lived until the Age of six in Stuttgart-East and then moved to Stuttgart-Wangen.
After I finished the first half of the fourth class (I guess I was about ten years old), my parents got divorced and I moved to Filderstadt with my mother. There I finished the fourth class and went to high school (I hope that this is the correct translation for it).
“May I never be complete. May I never be content. May I never be perfect.”
– Tyler Durden, Fight Club
My favourite occupation is and always has been sitting in front of the computer and writing code. Besides, 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 favourite music-genres are House and French-Rap (especially Mc Solaar, NTM and IAM), but I also listen to other genres if I like the songs. Besides the listening, I also produce music myself: I’m very interested in Dj’ing and I play the piano since I was four.
Since I don’t own a Turntable-Set at the moment, I do a lot of Software-Dj’ing and I’ve done some mixes, out of which two have already been played on the Funk/House channel of a pretty known german Internet-Radiostation called #Musik.
“Dancing is the vertical expression of the horizontal desire.”
– Unknown
Besides my interests into computers, hearing and making music, I’m also very fascinated of cars. I myself own a 1991 Honda CRX Ed9 1.6-16v and I’m very proud of it. It is one of the few stunning cars that take my breath away, though it’s now already quite old.
But I guess these cars are like wine, the older they get the better they are. My dream car would be a 1998 Toyota Supra MK4 3.0 Bi-Turbo, but since it is pretty expensive to get one (especially in this country) I guess that will remain a dream until I become a millionaire.
Beside the Supra I like cars like the Acura/Honda NSX, the Nissan Skyline and other ricers. But I’m not only interested in Japanese cars: I’m also pretty much into American cars.
I love the 1992 Pontiac Firebird as much as oldtimers like a 1971 Dodge Challenger. The only reason that pushes me more into ricers is the fact, that nowadays it’s nearly impossible to get/support such American cars.
“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. 😉 One year later, I got a new computer, it was a “high-end-machine” – AMD k6-2 450 MHz, Elsa Winner 1000/T3D, 64 Mb PC 133 RAM and a Soundblaster soundcard. 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 ever and first I just thought, “Ough, what a crap?!” – Linux.
My first Linux was some easyLinux (this distro doesn’t exist anymore, and nowadays I know why 😉 ) version I got from the homonymous german computer magazine.
However, I remember that I inserted the disc into my cdrom-drive, restarted my computer and saw an installation tool starting … “Penguin?! Wtf?!”,
I thought in the first moment. Then the setup-manager explained 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 didn’t touch it again for some months. But after the boredom of Windows annoyed me more and more, I decided to back up everything I needed (at that time on about 30 floppy-disks) and to install easyLinux.
After 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 2.0 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 connection 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
After some months I read something about a “SuSE-Linux” in a german computer magazine called “Computer-Bild” (hey, I was young and stupid … 😉 ). I went to the local library and borrowed the latest version… it was a 6.x. I was very surprised how easy the installation of that Linux distro was.
I decided to make it the distro I would use from then on. In that time I also got an internet-connection via 14k analogue modem. Browsing the internet was really fun and updating packages even more. I decided to stop spending hours downloading one package, instead, I started monitoring all kind of newsfeeds, mostly KDE stuff because I was using KDE at that time and wanted to get noticed of every change in it. A few time later I updated to SuSE 7.3. It was a Professional-Package with 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 in windows to configure the system (okay, maybe I exaggerate a bit). With SuSE 7.3 I got more and more interested in the programming language C++ and started learning it.
After half a year I dismissed it. The reason for this was, that I saw that it was useless to learn C++ on Linux because more than 90% of the System is written in C and the rest of it in Assembler.
I had two choices: To learn Assembler or to learn C. I decided to start 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 understood Linux, its applications and C more and more, I started leaving KDE and getting along with something 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.
“A program isn’t debugged until the last user is dead.”
– Unknown
After SuSE released their 8.0 version, I bought it and updated my 7.3 system. The same I did, when 8.1 has been released. My problem with SuSE was, that it was and still is too KDE-oriented. There weren’t many GNOME/GTK-packages on the SuSE CDs, and even the ones who were available were outdated. In this time my internet connection has been 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. Not only because of the low bandwidth, mainly because SuSE didn’t really provide newer binary-packages and sources… well.. did you ever try to compile a whole GNOME-DE on a 450 MHz computer?
A few weeks later I ordered a broadband connection at a well-known ISP and a Debian GNU/Linux Woody CD-set at an online shop. 😉 After I got my broadband I tested Debian and also some other distros (Red Hat, Mandrake, and a couple of other ones).
I noticed that my AMD K6 just became a bit too outdated for the software these distros where shipping (like for example OpenOffice.org), so: Let’s buy a new one! After some months of searching (and saving money) I finally found the computer I wanted: Intel Pentium 4 3,2 GHz HT, 1024 MB RAM, etc.
I bought this new computer and I also tried a new distro called Gentoo (version 1.2) on it. I hated and still hate it. Finally, I returned back to Debian and kept it till today.
“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 “a genius” Johnson, #gnome-art
While switching from distro to distro and from operating system to operating system (Linux, BSD, BeOS, etc.) I kept learning C and also got interessted in other languages like Brainfuck, PHP and C#. It was a real advantage to know C before occupying with these languages because C makes you really understand how a language works. How the memory is handled by the operating system, how different interfaces can be used and what risks a sloppy-written program can bring. If nowadays somebody would ask me what language to learn first, I would tell him C.
Today I work as a freelancer for different companies but also for private persons. Besides this, I do quite much administration and moderation at some projects/pages and also write my own software (for more information, take a look at my projects).
My software is mostly written in C, but I started learning C# (Mono) and sometimes also write some C++, though I dislike it. For writing web-pages I usually take PHP4 but I also did that in ASP.net a few times.
From my good old Windows-times, I still remember some Visual Basic (6.0, not the dotNet stuff – haven’t been using Windows anymore when this hype appeared), but I do not write it anymore. Instead, I write Brainfuck, it’s nearly the same. 😉
So, this was the short story about me. If you would like to make an inquiry or give me feedback, please feel free to contact me.
Knowledge
Programming/Scripting
- C
- C++ (at least the basics)
- C# (still learning)
- QuickBasic
- Visual Basic
- Python
Visual Basic for Applications
- PHP4/5 and MySQL
- Html editor
- Shell (bash)
- Brainf*ck
- WordPress
Operating Systems
- Linux (SuSE, Red Hat, Mandrake, Debian, Gentoo, Vida, any many more)
- Unix (FreeBSD, OpenBSD)
- Mac OS X
- Windows (3.1, 95, 98, Me, NT4, 2k, XP, 7, 8, 10)
Get in touch!
Would you like to know more about me or work me with? Feel free to write me a few lines!