Ahoy, mate!

 I'm yet another 34 years old Linux systems specialist from the land of Nokia. Shame on you in case you don't know the meaning of that. I work as a systems specialist for Sanoma Data. I used to be a html nerd for MikroBitti magazine and the webish side of it, MBnet, but during 2002 I made a more or less smooth transition to back-end side of this ride. Since then I've been a Linux administrator who maintains and further develops our Linux servers and services running on them.

Administering MBnet truly is a challenging job. Thousands of simultaneous connections. Hundreds of http requests per second. Tons of incoming mail and pop/imap/webmail logins. More than ten gigabytes of log files per day. More techno jargon and acronyms than most of you have ever heard. Issues regarding scalability, stability, reliability, security and speed. And I enjoy every moment.

Thanks to the sheer size of MBnet -- and later the sizes of all the other sites Sanoma Data is hosting -- I've learnt quite a lot during all these years. I'm pretty good at estimating what could work for us, what couldn't, how much hardware we need for a specific task, how to optimize all the pieces to be an efficient combination and how to make all of it seamless to our end-users. Whatever changes we do, it shouldn't be visible to our users, unless it's about some new functionality or a speed boost.

Since summer of 2007 MBnet has been part of Sanoma Data, which hosts IT services for SanomaWSOY, among other clients. Thanks to that I'm also part of the gang administering major Finnish sites including Helsingin Sanomat, Ilta-Sanomat and Huuto.net, just to name few of them. 

I've also learnt a lot about people. Partly my job is about interacting with our customers, and during the years I've seen all kinds of users: shy kids, nerds, girls, parents, angry users, funny users, helpful users... all the interaction is good and helps me to stay up-to-date on latest developments, let it be the latest hype-technology or the latest trend (say, blogs) what I should know about.

Nowadays I am 100% Linux user. I don't even have Windows installed. I used to need Windows for flying with Flight Simulator, but I replaced even that with Flight Gear.

I've always been a renegade who's looking for alternatives. Amiga was my primary computer until 1999 and since then a PC, but I still try to avoid using Windows whenever possible. Basically all I need is a fast, decent text-editor like vim or Kate, shell (preferably zsh), a music player (Amarok!), a multimedia player (mplayer), office package for viewing / creating text documents and spreadsheets, image processor mainly for resizing + enhancing pictures and some other small utilities so Linux is more than sufficient for me.

And all the real work happens with Perl, vim, sed and that kind of stuff, anyway. Oh, and by the way, should you happen to be a Gentoo user, you might be interested in my Portage Overlay. It contains some software which I find useful and is usually in official Portage, too, but gets updated too slowly. While typing this my overlay contains latest stable version of app-forensics/rkhunter (1.2.9), modified classes/php-pear-r1.eclass for making unstable PEAR work and latest stable version of mail-filter/spamassassin (3.1.8). Those are not yet in Portage. You may join my overlay with layman -f -o http://jannepikkarainen.fi/portage/layman-jmf.xml -a jaba.

Life? What life? I've heard some of you have it. I have some, too. One of the significant bits of it is that in 2006 I became a "celebrity" (yeah, right), though the show didn't got too many eye-pairs - 19th of February 2006 SubTV started to air a feeling-good reality-show called FC Nörtit, which I'm part of. The show tells about 16 nerds who gets trained by a professional football coach. After two months of training we played against HJK, which is the most successful football team in Finland.

I'm also an active ballroom dancer. And that's not all - I also have a Lysti the dog.

Well, that's about it for now. If you really, really, REALLY want to know more about me, please throw in some mail, use parrot call or consult that fat voodoo lady of Melee Island™.

Dismissed. I've got babies to kiss and hands to shake. Ta!