The Front Page

By Heather Stern

Ride the X11 Bus

This one's inspired by Tavis Ormandy of #fvwm on freenode, realising that one of his nearby bus lines to Uni really is the X11 bus. He took a pic to share - I asked him what he thought of my silly idea - the rest, as they say, is history.

You can't really see who's the driver, but hey, most people don't care what the Window Manager is anyway, as long as the keyboard works.

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Xteddy - a Gund "Tender Teddy" - was born in 1983, fell in love with Stegu's monitor in the 90's sometime, and since 1998 or so has been faithfully using Unix, though he has been seen on a Windows system now and then and even with a Macintosh once in a while. Lately he has been hanging out a lot in #fvwm on freenode, baking cookies, memorizing people's screenshots so as to be helpful, and indulging in a mocha now and then. The regulars there call him a little hug daemon - a ready source of hugs for all processes. Our Weekend Mechanic is one of his biggest fans. Our regular readers may recall that Xteddy featured in our second cover art picture over a year ago (back in issue 111). His good pal bear has also stood in for him on occasion.

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Wilbur has been the GIMP's mascot since whenever it was that he won that logo contest. Best thing he ever did. Now his work gets seen at speaking engagements in just about every major Linux technical conference. He's been working on outreach programs to benighted Windows users, as well.

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Konqi has been with the K desktop crowd for some time now. He enjoys fleshing out bug reports, and when he really gets into gear, polishing his shiny white taskbar. He and his girlfriend plan to visit Kiagara Falls sometime later this year, and enjoy the purple mists. For the uninitiated, "Kiagara Falls" is one of the finer wallpapers in the KDE collection. Consider taking a look at kde-look.org.

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Heather got started in computing before she quite got started learning English. By 8 she was a happy programmer, by 15 the system administrator for the home... Dad had finally broken down and gotten one of those personal computers, only to find it needed regular care and feeding like any other pet. Except it wasn't a Pet: it was one of those brands we find most everywhere today...

Heather is a hardware agnostic, but has spent more hours as a tech in Windows related tech support than most people have spent with their computers. (Got the pin, got the Jacket, got about a zillion T-shirts.) When she discovered Linux in 1993, it wasn't long before the home systems ran Linux regardless of what was in use at work.

By 1995 she was training others in using Linux - and in charge of all the "strange systems" at a (then) 90 million dollar company. Moving onwards, it's safe to say, Linux has been an excellent companion and breadwinner... She took over the HTML editing for "The Answer Guy" in issue 28.

Here's an autobiographical filksong she wrote called The Programmer's Daughter.