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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.

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