Matthew Ogilvie's Home Page

Contact Information

If you would like to contact me, one of my several email addresses is at a site called gmail.com, with username "mmogilvi4711+hp".

Open Source Software

I'm a big fan of open source software and Linux, although so far I've contributed far less to it then I would have liked.

In attempt to start to change that, I've started posting various small projects I've worked on (web-based file transfer tool, CVS stuff, mail stuff, and more to come?).

Favorite Authors

When I'm not doing computer things, I'm usually reading science fiction or fantasy.

One of my favorite authors is Orson Scott Card. I first heard of him in 1999, and within two years I had alaready read about 20 of his books. His most well known book is called Ender's Game, which is about a young kid being trained to lead a war against aliens. This description makes it sound kind of cheezy/stupid, but it illustrates a pattern I've seen in many of his books: The basic description makes them sound silly, but when you read them, they are actually very good. His more recent stuff isn't as good, but it is still OK.

I also like Timothy Zahn (author of several Star Wars novels, plus lots of other sci-fi novels). Some of his stuff is really good, other stuff is OK. I haven't seen anything that is not at least moderagely good, although a lot of it isn't very deep.

I used to really like the late Robert Jordan, author of the series The Wheel of Time and other works. The earlier books in the series were quite good, although most of the the last few (except the latest, Knife of Dreams) were not very good. I found a really good summary of what the various books are like in this Slashdot post.

James Oliver Rigney, Jr. (aka Robert Jordan) passed away on September 16, 2007, due to complications related to cardiac amyloidosis, a disease he had been fighting for about 1.5 years.

Three more Wheel of Time books were finished by Brandon Sanderson, who worked from Jordan's partial manuscript and notes. This is documented in more detail on the wikipedia page about the last book: A Memory of Light.

I've also read most of Sanderson's own work, and have yet to encounter anything I didn't like. He may currently be my favorite author. I have not started reading Sanderson's The Stormlight Archive series; I want to wait for a few more books in the series to come out first. But I've heard good things about it.

Patrick Rothfuss shows some promise, although it is approaching 10 years since he started publishing his Kingkiller trilogy that was supposedly done before the first book was published, and was going to be published over just three years. Also, based on subtle hints (involving shorter works and his blog), I have some doubts that I am going to like the ending.

I also liked the first few books of Terry Goodkind's The Sword of Truth series, but it kind of went downhill towards the end (essentially preaching the the evils of communism over and over and over and over...), and I haven't been inclined to try any of his other newer novels.

Links

Web Development

It seems to be getting harder and harder to host a tiny little homepage. Currently this site is hosted on sourceforge.

Over the years, various hosting services have given up hosting this tiny site for various questionable reasons, including Adelphia (dead; circa 2005), Comcast (dead; circa 2015), and miniinfo (dead; circa 2017). I find this annoying.

Comcast has hard to find documentation; so I wrote up a page of my own notes about Comcast's network settings and servers, although they've dropped support for standard services like nntp, etc.

Last updated Jul 2017.