About the author and this site

The Author

My name is Navin. I live in Sydney, Australia. I am a recent ruby and python enthusiast and am happily curious about where this might take me. I studied Computer Science when Z-80s and 6502s were the microprocessors of the day and the university lab splurged on a bunch of NeXT workstations (don’t know what these are? Then read some history). My Operating Systems class involved group readings of the Unix kernel source. Some mathematicians on campus were nice to me once and 10 years later I found myself with a PhD in pure mathematics and a couple of publications to my name.

I have been around the block a few times, and live(d) a few very different lives. These include:

  • C Programmer
  • Research mathematician and teacher
  • Bioinformatics groupie
  • PKI, Identity and Trust afficionado
  • Information security architect and consultant
  • Senior manager at a consulting firm and at a financial institution

I like to learn – really a lot.

The Site

I write here. Topics include information and opinion relevant to my adventures as a technologist. I will not publish anything here of a personal nature.

As a result of my recent forays into development, I decided to build this site using ruby and other open-source tools. I conciously decided not to use tumblr or posterous or similar … and to see whether I can get to a point where I don’t notice any productivity blocks resulting from “blogging like a hacker.”

So, I have chosen to have this site hosted on GitHub using their Pages feature. The site is created using Tom Preston-Werner’s excellent Jekyll static site generator. I get to write in textile or markdown, learn about design as I tweak the layout of the site, and, store everything in Git. I will (if I haven’t already) write about how I set up this site, and what services and tools play here.

I used Alex Payne’s site as a starting point – I like the simplicity of its structure, style and appearance. I have since also borrowed HTML and CSS from Andrew Carter’s blog.

License

All original textual content is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Australia License.

Contact

Feel free to get in touch. My email address is navin at novemberkilo.com