I've been involved with computer science and networking for the last 15 years, with a specific interest in opensource software and network security. Some of my published security research received significant public attention a while back. For example, try googling for my writeup on the "Internet Auditing Project". I think it's aged rather well.

I first installed Linux on my trusty old 386 IBM-compatible back in 1995. It was an ancient version of Slackware with a pre 2.X kernel (1.2.13). It may have been primitive by todays standards but the possibility of having my own little tiny Unix system to play with hooked me right away.

Since then I've dabbled with possibly every major Linux distribution and some of the smaller ones too, including Debian, Redhat (before it became Fedora), Mandrake (before it became Mandriva), Gentoo, and finally Ubuntu which is what I run on my desktop these days. The first version of Ubuntu I used personally was Breezy, and I've been recommending Ubuntu to anyone who would listen since Dapper. I also do quite a bit of Ubuntu-related development at work...

These days I'm an opensource enthusiast that contributes to various projects (including Ubuntu) and develops software for a living. Mostly Python, though I've worked with Perl, C, Java, C++, shell script, and what not...

I am also one of the developers for TurnKey Linux, a new opensource project that develops a family of lightweight installable live CDs optimized for various server-type tasks including LAMP, Ruby on Rails, Django, Joomla, Drupal, MediaWiki, MySQL and PostgreSQL:

http://www.turnkeylinux.org/

My personal homepage is http://liraz.org which currently includes a strange eclectic collection of ancient software I authored back in the old days, and an even stranger Perl obfuscation web service. I consider the latter a practical joke - Perl doesn't need any more obfuscation!