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My name is Andrew Nicols. I live and work in Lancaster, UK.
I graduated from Lancaster University in 2007 with a Masters by Research (MRes) in Design and Evaluation of Advanced Interactive Systems, in which I received a Distinction grade.
I also received a BA with Honours in Music Technology in 2006 from Lancaster University.
I now work for LUNS where I primarily work on end user service
provision. My job role involves a variety of Linux and Solaris system
administration, systems and software programming, packaging,
troubleshooting, day-to-day maintenance tasks, and design work.
I believe in the values of open source software and to that end, I try
to use it and contribute back to it whenever possible.
As such, my choice of operating system for both desktop and server is
Debian Linux
and I have submitted several bugs to the Debian bug tracker as a
contribution to its continued development. I have also helped with and
contributed towards a variety of other open source projects.
I am currently working to organise the Mahara UK 2012
Conference here in Lancaster, UK.
Recently I've been intrigued by the Debian preseed system and have been
working on a way to help automate our installation process by combining
Debian preseeding with our in-house configuration management system.
At present, this utilises Grub 2 and a pen-drive, but I would like to
look at the use of a network boot environment involving DHCPd, tftpd and
a PXE boot setup.
I use ViM and git
on a daily basis and I'm also familiar with subversion
though prefer git to subversion.
My current work has been focusing on Moodle and Mahara to create an ePortfolio system for an estimated 250
schools in the North West.
This has involved numerous customisations and alterations to the Mahara
code base, and most of these changes have been submitted back to the Mahara
project.
I have also reported and helped to fix a number of bugs on both Moodle and
Mahara and am a Mahara core developer.
I have also recently begun to contribute to the openCSW project and
maintain a number of packages as part of the project.
I frequently code using php and am trying to learn perl to a greater
extent. I also regularly use bash and am familiar with several other
shells, languages, scripting frameworks, and markup languages.
Other projects I have worked on or contributed towards include:
I also work with Apache2, PostgreSQL, Bind, and Squid on a regular
basis.
In the past my academic interests have primarily focused around
Human-Computer Interaction with particular emphasis on multimedia
interactions and large-screen displays.
I am now much more interested in improving user experiences, particularly
for both children and with older users.
My personal interests include playing with computers, listening to and
playing music, travelling, cinema and film, coding, walking, cycling and
skiing.
I play the violin, and clarinet and I also sing regularly. I have also
tried my hand at both the viola and the piano in the past.
Andrew Nicols
