Introducing myself

[Petter Reinholdtsen]

Some of you might have noticed that I just started sending patches,
and wonder who am I.  Here is a short introduction.

I'm from Norway, and has been working of free software development
since 1992.  I have worked on several projects along the way, and
submitted patches to even more projects.  At the moment I am involved
in Skolelinux, Debian, gpsd, GNU libc (locales), ng-utils, chrpath,
OpenStreetmap and quite a few others.  I am a developer and system
administrator by trade, and did most of my university degree at the
University of Tromsø.  My tool chest contain most procedural
programming languages, and at the moment I program most of my stuff in
perl and C.  A few years ago I was involved with the RoboCup team
CIIPS Glory while I was in Perth, Australia, teaching robots how to
play soccer. :)

As part of my involvement in OpenStreetmap project, I've started
looking at the free GIS tools available.  I already knew about the
Debian GIS sub-project in Debian, and am starting to get involved
there.  One of the tools still missing in Debian is mapserver, so I
decided to make an effort to get the mapserver source ready for
uploading into the Debian archive.  Which leads me here.

Whenever I start looking at some project, I try to compile the source
with as many warning flags as possible, and as many different
compilers as possible, to get a general impression on the code
quality.  Mapserver do not look to bad in this regard, but there are
several things left to fix.  I do this because I know by experience
that warnings reported by one or more compilers are real or hidden
bugs waiting to be triggered, and all the architectures in Debian are
likely to expose these bugs sooner or later.  So I try to reduce the
chance of this happening with the Mapserver package.

I'm cooperating with the prospective Debian mapserver package
maintainer (Thomas Sondag), and will assist in making mapserver ready
for uploading.  When this is done, I will probably move on and leave
mapserver alone.

My involvement in the OpenStreetmap project is currently making it
easier for contributors to submit GPS point collections, work on
exchange systems and storage solutions for the collected data, and
trying to build tools to help us extract roads from the GPS data
collected.  I plan to use mapserver to visualize the collected data,
and am still learning how to use mapserver.

So, you can expect more patches from me for a while now, and I hope
the patches will be well received.

  OpenStreetmap, <URL:http://www.openstreetmap.org/>
  Skolelinux, <URL:http://www.skolelinux.org/>
  Debian, <URL:http://www.debian.org/>
  GNU libc, <URL:http://www.gnu.org/software/libc/>
  Debian GIS, <URL:http://pkg-grass.alioth.debian.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl>
  ng-utils, <URL:http://freshmeat.net/projects/ng-utils/>
  chrpath, <URL:http://freshmeat.net/projects/chrpath/>
  gpsd, <URL:http://gpsd.berlios.de/>

--
Petter Reinholdtsen