Welcome to my old, stale homepage.
These are my latest pictures. If you are interested in them, please visit my image gallery.
Do you want to go to the Software index page?I live in Duisburg, the home of Schimanski (a TV policy detective who happened to detect every dirty corner of the town. We have an astonishing number of them :-/, and this number still grows at a rate i don't like :-( ).
But Duisburg also has it's nice sides. You might see them on a sunny day looking around from the top of the tower on the little hill at the "Sechs Seen Platte", which has been rebuild.
My Email address is uwe@ohse.de. Please note that i'm running a rather strict challenge-response based spam filter. You may send me mail encrypted with PGP or GPG, using the key found on this page. Please use encryption for sensitive information, and please use the new key generated 2004-12-15.
You may contact me by phone, but please think about the time when calling me. I'm in germany, central europe, and to find out what the time is at that place try the following unix command on a bourne compatible shell (/bin/sh, ksh, bash):
TZ=Europe/Berlin date
My phone number is +49 203 734357. I'm much more fluent in written than in spoken english.
I happen to make my money by working with them and on them, and i am a programmer by profession, a system adminstrator by need and a computer addict. I'm really good at finding and solving software bugs, and very good at designing lean software - but most people think that my software lacks basic features like an editor plugin for a job scheduler. I refuse to not create bloat unless i'm paid for it.
I wrote or maintained a number of free software packages. They include lrzsz (the unix zmodem), a ftp mirroring tool, a replacement for cron and at, a BBS and asorted tools. You may read about the newer packages here and about older packages there.
I've also written not so free software, including large parts of the technical infrastructure of a com/net/org domain registrar, a number of low level tools for reading data from digital measurement instruments and not so low level tools to analyze the data, and even, long ago, worked on SCSI firmware. I also worked on a network based on MIDI, parallel port and serial port connections, but rest assured: this thing is dead and i will not do it again.
Sometimes i fix or extend other peoples software. There's a list of available patches.
I speak C, awk, sh, sed, perl, php, python and sometimes C++. I once spoke cobol, pascal, modula, basic, smalltalk, assembler, tcl, some languages i'd possibly be sorry to have forgotten about (if I knew it) and some things i'm happy to have forgotten about.
Once I had the habit to learn a new language every year or even more often, but this changed in the last years. Since then I prefer small languages, and most new languages tend to be overly bloated with features, too large for anybody to understand everything about the language (ever worked in a team where no two people spoke the same subset of the language?).
I'm also not an OO addict, and while i admit that object orientation is useful for some things it's neither needed nor useful for others. Besides that the developers of OO languages should have a look at smalltalk, where OO even feeled right.
So i'm not learning Java, C# or whatever comes next year unless the developers get a clue. Java? Get a clue, the libraries stink. C#? Well, it feels better than java.
I'm also very familiar with the unix tool chain, of course.
You might not guess it from the look of this page, but i known and use more than just basic HTML.
I have been involved in a number of computer courses, but i have to admit that i'm not a good teacher. On the other hand i had some success teaching smaller groups of people.
Sometimes I teach C or Unix, often enough both together. I'm notorious for my C code examples.
i HTMLized a few RFCs. These days there are better sources for HTML versions of these RFCs, but some people seem to have links to my ones, and i don't want to break them by removing my files.
As you might have guessed from the pictures above. As of july 2011 i'm working on naturfotografen-forum.de, which is a nature photography forum in german.
At the moment i'm gamemastering with our own fantasy RPG (in german only) [interested? Duisburg area]. You may find information about some of our campaigns here (german only, once again).
I also happen to play, these days mostly in a group using our own
RPG, though i play DSA, Traveller or Midgard once a year or so.
Besides that i sometimes play very freely in the way others have
called DRASTIC.
And right now i'm looking for a possibility to play ... fantasy RPGs
preferred.
You can read about some of my characters here (in german, once again).
I'm not interested in LARPs, MUDs, computer RPGs or email based RPGs.
I run a BBS of the german MausNet, and was once one of the people developing some software packages for it. Read about my activities here.
Some articles I wrote. Most are news postings.
Description of the mailing lists hosted on my machines.
Internet Surveys. These are not continued anymore.
I recommend Wein Rüsing as an example for a mistake made by many mediocre web designers: They don't use the place on the screen screen. Of course this doesn't mean that the wine you can buy there is mediocre, too.
My current idea of web design is shown on the home page of the UWS Delfin Homberg or naturbildforum.de.