[LinuxBrit]

Personal Info

Cheesy picture of meMy name's Tom Gilbert, I live in London, England, I'm 30, and I work for Deutsche Bank, where I am the Global Head of Web Infrastructure Engineering. My specialities are Perl, Linux/UNIX, Apache, J2EE, Weblogic and basically gluing together+automating large applications and infrastructures. That's me in the picture on the right there, although it goes back a few years now ;)

This is my fifth job. Previously I was with Finetix as an OSS/Unix consultant, and before that - Killik and Co, a stockbrokers in the city working as their linux guru, hired to bring a large project to completion. Before that, a consultant for ID-Pro, whose UK operation sadly went bust in October 2000, and before that I worked for British American Tobacco. Prior to that I was at the University of Bath, where I got myself an honours degree in Chemistry.

Me and computers

I've always been interested in computers, and initially toyed around with an Amstrad CPU464 when I was a kid, writing dumb little programs in BASIC. Then I got to play with some BBC model B's at school (although I think we pretty much only played elite and tried to network sniff the teacher's password). I never really had good access to a computer again until 1997, when I bought myself a PC. Thinking back, that's about the time I stopped playing sports, lost my healthy tan, and started going outside less ;-)

Me and Linux

I didn't discover Linux until the end of 1998. I fought with the redhat 5.1 installer to get it on my PC, and was disappointed with what I saw (fvwm-95 in lets-look-like-windows mode). I lost interest straight away.

Early in 1999, I got really bugged with the Windows platform, and tried again. I chose Redhat again (by now at 5.2), fought the installer (and won), and this time met GNOME running under Enlightenment. This was more like it. I took the time to properly explore Linux, and immediately fell in love.

Bash was wonderful, Enlightenment beautiful, the environment was solid and things made sense. It appeared that at last, the limits of what I could achieve were purely my own - not of the environment, and I decided to "get involved".

At this point, I had no real computing skills. So, early in 1999, I sat down, and started to teach myself C. I read some books, lots of source code, about every manpage and HOWTO I could find, and started to grow. I got used to the environment, and how to use the tools available. In about 3 months, I had learnt enough to send people patches, it took another 3 to really get my act together. I've spent the time since contributing as much as I can. There is always more to learn, but I feel now that all I need is time. It's about the only limitation to what I can do with Linux right now. That's why I love Linux, it just doesn't stand in your way.

Along with learning C, there were a number of other things I needed to pick up as I went. So I picked up shell scripting, perl, HTML, XML (lot's of Meta languages basically ;), SQL, m4 and of course lots of *nix system administration, security, networking and hardware installation.

I've since developed a real interest in programming languages, and learned python, ruby, PHP, C++, Java, lisp and even a little C#.

Personal Coding projects

Random stuff about me

Now Playing...

People are always asking me what music I'm in to, and I never know what to say - I like all sorts. So instead of pigeonholing myself, here's a list of tracks I currently play lots.

Update: That list is from a few years ago now - more recently I'm mostly listening to: The White Stripes, Keane, The Strokes, Belle and Sebastian, Bonny "Prince" Billy, The Libertines, Damien Rice, Franz Ferdinand, Kaiser Chiefs, Snow Patrol, Sigur Ros, Bloc Party, Aqualung, Elbow, Daniel Powter, The Frames.

In fact here's what Last.fm has to say:

giblet's Last.fm Weekly Tracks Chart

giblet's Last.fm Overall Artists Chart

Movies

You can tell a lot about a person by the kind of movies they like ;-) Basically apart from the obvious Sci-Fi stuff (e.g. the Matrix) and almost everything from Tarantino, you're looking at films involving Kevin Spacey, Tom Hanks or Robin Williams. I've tried to vaguely order these - but in reality it depends on my mood :)

On October 12th, 2002 I got married to Suzanne.

I hang out on irc most nights. You can find me in #gah on irc.freenode.net with the nick giblet.

You can chat to me via Google Talk, or some other jabber client - I'm tom.gilbert.

I have a View Tom Gilbert's profile on LinkedIn LinkedIn profile.

I have an advogato log here, but I haven't updated it in some time..

My GnuPGP public key

Is it my birthday? Check out my Amazon wishlist!