Shortly after buying my first computing magazine in the late '70s I was providing technical support to my school and teaching assembly language to my friends. After graduating with a BSc in Computer Science from Reading University I implemented bespoke systems for the legal and accounting sector, developed systems for internet-via-satellite, developed and optimised algorithms for bioinformatics research to do sequence comparisons at scale, finally ending up in the financial sector where I have been heavily involved in the build out of large scale compute farms, cloud migrations etc.
I have been involved with Linux almost from its birth, contributing kernel code, device drivers and the iBCS support that was instrumental in bringing commercial software to the Open Source world. Today my interests range from mega-scale cloud computing right down to the world of microprocessors and IoT.
(If you are wondering where the "Ob" comes from you weren't around in the early days of Usenet. Don't worry about it!)
The stuff below is Old. For newer, and even current stuff, see http://git.eris-associates.co.uk/
Porting between flavours of Unix is alleged to be hard. The iBCS module module for Linux makes it so easy it is an end user task. The iBCS module provides the necessary support to load various types of binaries and emulates the system call interfaces and important devices of several flavours of i386 Unix. It also automatically recognises the system each binary was compiled for and faithfully emulates the specific environment required by each running program - at the same time if necessary. All you have to do is run your programs!
The diald daemon for Linux allows fine grained control of dial up and other "intermittent" network interfaces. It is possible to control exactly what packets cause a link to be brought up, how quickly the link is dropped under various types of traffic and to monitor the link using a graphical admin tool.
Originally diald was written by Eric Schenk however Eric's increasing work load (and improving network connection!) lead to the baton being passed on. My releases of diald can be found at diald.sourceforge.net.