Scott O'Brien

About Me

As you can probably already guess from my blog title, my name is Scott O’Brien.  I am a student at the University of Wollongong currently about to undertake a year of studying honours.  I plan my honours research to be on that which I find interesting, the space of multi-user online virtual environments.  I write this blog to document the projects I’m working on, and the thoughts I come up with.

I have a few hobbies, namely Computers (just about everything about them!), Electronics (and programming micro-controllers), Music (playing the piano and listening to just about all genres of music) and just tinkering in general.

Computers have always been my hobby and passion.  Developing software and solutions have always been something I love doing since I can remember.  Please swing by my projects page to see a few things I’ve worked on in the past.

If I’m not programing, I like playing with other peoples programs and setting things up.  My passions in this area are in the wonderful world of *nix.  This isn’t to say I don’t like windows, just that, given the opportunity, I wouldn’t let it anywhere in the world of enterprise or consumer computing as far as I’d care to see.  This is especially the case in terms of Servers.  A Linux server will give you so many options as to software you wish to use for whatever tasks you might need (DHCP, DNS, HTTP Servers.. the list goes on and on).  Microsoft like to charge you an arm and a leg for software that I believe is no better then the GNU equivalents.

From my Microsoft rant, I bet you can guess that Linux is defiantly a hobby of mine.  I have a little tiny (literally, it consumes 4W of electricity) computer set up as my router.  It acts as a gateway between my home network (home.scottyob.com haha) and the internet using iptables and port NATing.  OpenVPN is configured to allow me to join my home network from afar (great for the IP printer.)  VoIP and Asterisk are defiantly another big hobby I hope to be blogging a bit about.  Other then that, my other big hobbies lie in network design ( Thanks to Daniel Saffioti’s System Administration subject), subnetting and service planning.

For more information on my achievements, please feel free to poke around my CV and projects posted on the site.