About
How to contact me
You can reach me at: weblog_at_tonkersten.com.
My GPG key fingerprint is:
83C9 2481 D471 4FA4 B460 C449 B0BA ACA1 1B75 966C
Where the last 8 characters are the key-id.
I also like to receive books, whisky, gadgets and CD's 
and I talk about
and "do" technology, don't like politics and love food and cooking for
friends and quiet dinner parties.
Education
I studied computer science at the Venlo Polytechnic (called IHBO Venlo, aka HTS Venlo), where I received the Bachelors degree in 1989.
This is where I was introduced to the lovely UNIX operating system. Thanks Mr. Euwe.
You can see my personal and public profile on LinkedIn
UNIX/Linux
I live in Groesbeek, in the Netherlands, near the German border and I run all kinds of Linux and UNIX. For instance my laptop runs Ubuntu and my servers run a variety of stuff, like CentOS, FreeBSD and OpenBSD.
When I first met UNIX in 1986 I was immediately very impressed with the flexibility and the ease of use. I got hooked, very bad.
And then Linux came long, which I started using way back in 1992, when the
kernel version was at 0.96alpha. This was a 40 floppy SLS (Soft Landing
Systems) distribution, the predecessor of
Slackware, running on my Intel 486 PC with only
8MB of RAM. And it worked like a charm. I was completely sold. Later on I
switch to Yggdrasil and after that I switch back to
Slackware again. This all until my boss decided we
needed to use Redhat Linux.
After a lot of work of the Open Source community configuration and installation of a Linux machine is much simplified and I believe it's almost there to take over Windows.
Even after all these years I'm still charmed with the simplicity and ways to tweak a UNIX / Linux system. It does what I want it to do and not the other way around.
Making my hobby into work I joined forces at AT Computing in 2001 as a UNIX/Linux consultant and as a UNIX/Linux teacher.
What Not To Do
HTML formatted mail has a very high chance of ending up in my spam folder - where it will probably be discarded. Also, please use a subject line in your message.
I will not authenticate messages sent to people with strict anti-spam tools, like mail blocks and stuff. I have better things to do with my time. We all hate spam, but don't push the problem to other people.
Please, do not send me spam e-mail (doesn't everybody want that??). I will charge you a dollar or a euro for every spam mail sent to me for transport, storage and annoyance. So if you send spam, be prepared to pay.
HAM Operator
I'm a licensed HAM operator (with CW included) with call sign PA1TON and my
QTH is in Groesbeek, The Netherlands. The Maidenhead locator is JO21xs.
Geek info
Have a look at Geek Code to see what it means. And, yes, I do think that I am a nerd. And I am proud of it. (I'm glad I'm not a sports-jock. I would get rather bored with asking: "Would you like fries with your burger, sir?")
-----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK----- Version: 3.12 GCS/E/IT d- s-:+> a+>? c++ ULSHA*++++$ P++ L+++ E--- W++ N++ O- K- w--- !O M V PS+ PE+ Y+ PGP++ t++@ !5 X+ R-> tv+() b++>+++ DI++ D G++>+++ e++ h r+++ y+ C++ -----END GEEK CODE BLOCK-----
Github
I write a lot of shell scripts for customers and myself. Some of these could be usefull to others, so I did put some on Github
CA Cert
I am a certified CA Cert assurer (CACert) with assurer certificate number 000507.
If you do have a CACert account and would like to be assured, just send an email to make an appointment. (Living near Groesbeek would be handy, of course)
Prince2
On May 13 2009 I took the "Prince2 Foundation" exam and succeeded.
So, now I do have a "Prince2 Foundation qualification".
Maybe, when time comes, I will do the "Prince2 Practitioner" as well.
Comments
Comments are enabled through the DisQus service, so it's possible to comment on stuff on this site.
Please do not spam.
Copyright and stuff like that
This site is copyright by me (Ton Kersten).
If you like an article and want to use it for something, please do go ahead. You do need to link to my site or mention me when you do use it. And, of course, it would be very nice if you would let me know.
HTML and CSS Compliant
Care has been taken to make this site XHTML 1.0 (transitional)
compliant. There's only one minor problem, and that has to do with the Disqus
comment system. They want a tag called data-disqus-identifier and that's not
a proper HTML tag. I haven't found a browser that borks on this, yet. If you
do, please let me know.
Last time I checked [2012-01-20] it was.
How it's created and maintained
This site is generated with We-Blog, a forked and patched version of BlazeBlogger, Markdown in Python with the Source code highlight extension and Pygment, and (of course) Vim (not patched by me).
