Tux Deluxe - The Authors
Tux Deluxe is produced by a loose collective of writers, artists, musicians and programmers and can be considered as a repository of some of our work, past and present. We specialise in writing about Linux, free software and digital rights, but we like to roam into other areas of cultural interest. Some of these articles have previously appeared elsewhere, but the copyright for the articles belongs to the individual authors. Consult the author before reproducing any article in any format.
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The Authors
Richard Hillesley is a software consultant, freelance editor and writer.
He lives in Totnes in the south-west of England, where he plays, dances, breathes and sometimes appears as a standup poet with the jazz ensemble Mixed Economy, who deserve your attention for a thousand other reasons.
Richard writes for a variety of dead tree and online magazines. In a former life he was the editor of LinuxUser & Developer magazine, for 17 years a software engineer, and before that a docker, railway guard, yacht delivery crew, and co-worker in an alternative bookshop...
Jeremy Allison is a lead software developer with the Samba Team.
Jeremy was born in Sheffield in the Socialist Republic of South Yorkshire, but now lives deep in Silicon Valley where he works for Google. doing what he would be doing anyway, coding and debugging, debugging and coding Samba.
Despite the many temptations that might have lured him to the dark side, Jeremy can justly lay claim to have been true to Richard Stallman's dictum that: "Unlike some of you, I am not an open source developer, I am an activist in the free software movement."
Martin Howse is an artist, programmer, theorist and film-maker. He founded ap (artificial paradises) in 1998 to produce and explore performative and distributed artistic software investigating issues of physical data manifestation and generation within a free software context.
Martin has performed and collaborated worldwide using custom software and hardware modules for data/code processing and generation. He writes regularly for Linux/free software publications and has partipated in related conferences and workshops.
ap projects have included the ap02 distributed environmental code-creation software and an environmental computational work, entitled ap0201, whiich was installed deep in the Mojave desert and received first prize in Art & Artificial Life VIDA 8.0, 2005.
xxxxx was initiated by Martin Howse (in collaboration with Jonathan Kemp) in 2006 with the xxxxx event series and acclaimed xxxxx [reader] compendium publication. Current projects include an ongoing series of open workshops towards the establishment of a research institute in Berlin, the coding of promiscuOS, a totally untethered and highly promiscuous computer operating system, and implementation of a mobile flaneur/scrying data platform.
Jason Kitcat is Managing Director at Swing Digital, a specialist provider of web software for school communities. He researches voting, e-voting and e-democracy.
He regularly speaks on these topics at conferences and is quoted in the media including Newsweek, The Wall Street Journal, The Times, The Independent, RTE Radio 1 and The Register.
He has worked with online communities since the early 1990s and has founded or co-founded a number of technology related companies. He holds a BSc(Hons) from the University of Warwick in Computer Science & Management Science, MSc Technology & Innovation Management from the University of Sussex. He is half English and half French-Canadian.
John Muckle’s publications include Firewriting (poems, Shearsman Books, 2005), The Cresta Run (short stories, Galloping Dog Press, 1987) and Cyclomotors (a novella, Festival Books, 1997). He has also published a study of Allen Ginsberg, a number of children’s books, and was founding editor of the late lamented Paladin poetry list.
Some responses to CYCLOMOTORS:
"An excellently-written little book."
Terry Eagleton
"I think Cyclomotors is my best book of 1997 and a real bit of quality in a fairly bleak landscape."
Michael Moorcock
"It's a wonderful book - marvellously constructed, and of a fidelity to experience such as you only come across with a true storyteller - as distinct from word spinner!
John Berger
"I like it very much.
More power to your writing hand."
Harold Pinter
"Nothing I have previously read has captured so well the atmosphere of growing up on the edges of London in the immediate post-second world war years as John Muckle's Cyclomotors.
An elegant book."
Tom Raworth
"... Tom Raworth puts it all so much better than I ever could. The illustrations are beautiful. Did I ever tell you about the character Mr. Muckle in W.C. Fields' greatest film 'It's a Gift'? He's a comic blind man who manages to all but demolish Fields' general store. Fields keeps trying to restrain him by calling him: 'Mr Muckle Honey' – a bit of political incorrectness that would be inconceivable today."
John Ashbery
Frank Pohlmann studied humanities and escaped with degrees in philosophy and history from 2 universities in England and Germany. He took a detour via China and Taiwan, learning a bit of Chinese on the way.
In the mid 90s he discovered computers and writing, pretty much at the same time. To the despair of his friends, he did Linux system administration and a little bit of Perl. He also wrote unpublished poetry and started editing and writing technical books and articles.
He lived in California and Southern India before returning to England and having a go at not working in corporate jobs. He ended up being a CTO for an outsourcing company while working as a technology journalist in the evenings.
He is running Ostracode these days, a security training and consultancy company with locations in England and the Philippines. He is also interested in French literature, philosophy, the history of computer science and non-Indoeuropean languages.
Daniel James is the director of 64 Studio Ltd, a company which produces a 64-bit GNU/Linux distribution designed specifically for creative users, and does custom development work for OEMs with multimedia products.
Daniel worked on LinuxUser & Developer magazine for seven years, serving as Editor from the autumn of 2005 until early 2007. Over the last few years, his media work has expanded to cover a long-held interest in sound recording, with several music and voice-over projects completed at his own studio. He also contributes occasional articles on music recording and related technology to Sound on Sound magazine.
Since 1999 he has lived and worked on the Isle of Wight, which is a small island a few miles from the south coast of England. He helped launch the UK's first community wireless ISP there, and it's still going strong.
Robert Vint is a freelance writer and environmental campaigner and has previously run an environmental teacher training agency and a programme of conferences on ecology and philosophy.
He lives in an underground bunker in Totnes from where, in the guise of Genetic Food Alert, he masterminds an international resistance movement to save the world's food and crops from patenting, takeover and destruction by Monsatan.
Robert has a particular interest in the use and abuse of science; he campaigns against intellectual property laws and the unsustainable and undemocratic use of technology by multinational corporations and in support of 'tools for democracy' and renewable energy technologies.
Sam Richards
1949. I was born in the same year as Hurricane Higgins, Tom Waits, and the Peoples Republic of China. I share my birthday with Charlie Chaplin, Merce Cunningham and Henry Mancini who composed “Moon Riverâ€. I’m jealous of Henry.
I was brought up on a musical diet of Bessie Smith, Mozart, Burl Ives, bebop and modern jazz. My Dad was in the printing trade and Mum was a nurse. I got lots of free comics and no time off school for sickness. My old man, pen-name Allen Saddler, writes novels, radio plays, stage plays, bits and pieces of journalism and children’s books. I never wanted to follow in his footsteps.
My academic career was undistinguished. I was refused a six form year at the local snotty grammar school, did a 2 year music course and failed A level, left the Guildhall School of Music after one year, had to beg my way into a second year at Dartington, and got thrown off a final year after teaching practice. I thoroughly enjoyed my student years. Just recently I remembered I’d got thrown out of the Wolf Cubs when I was 13.
I was always attracted to experimental music. I wrote a book about John Cage a few years ago. Cage’s idea that “society is the greatest impediment an artist could have†always appealed to me until Mrs. Thatcher proclaimed that there was no such thing as society. Ever since then I’ve sort of liked society.
For many years as a folk performer I peddled a kind of tuneful ethnic Marxism around the country. Then I returned to composing and improvising music – which is what I continue to do alongside part time university teaching and writing. One of the colleges where I teach part time is under threat of closure. I wrote a piss-take of the Principal on the save-the-college website which resulted in me getting the sack. I’m beginning to think that father’s footsteps aren’t so bad after all.
Joe Dyer is 86 years old and was born in the North-East of England. His schooling consisted of the three Rs. He left at the age of thirteen plus and spent the whole of his working life in heavy industry until the age of seventy one, first as a miner and later as a foundry worker. Now, with his wife, he is spending a happy retirement as a member of his local community centre, where he is a member of the writer's group. With the help of a most competent teacher, he is also learning the computer. A difficult task at his age, but well worth the effort, if successful.
Allen Saddler left school at fourteen with no qualifications and educated himself in the public library. He has written several novels, including The Great Brain Robbery, Gilt Edge (both published by Elek Books), Talking Turkey (Michael Joseph), Betty (Sphere Books), and Bless ’em All (Peter Owen). He has also written a number of books for children, including the King and Queen books (published by OUP, and broadcast on BBC Playschool and BBC Radio 7), Mr Wizz (Abelard-Schuman), Jerry and the Monsters (Methuen, was also used as a teaching aid in Estonia), Jerry and the Inventions (also Methuen), Smudger’s Seaside Spectacular, Smudger’s Saturday Special (both Blackie), Sam’s Swop Shop (OUP), The Relay Race (Methuen). Allen also supplied the foreword for Dreamcatcher, published in 2005.
Stage plays:
Them was performed at the Plymouth Theatre, All Basic Comforts at the Orchard Theatre, King and Queen Show at the Sedgemoor Theatre, Kindly Leave the Stage KLS, Better Dead at the Western Union, Working the System at the Wessex Theatre, Nothing Personal was performed by Turning Point, Champagne and Kippers was performed by Theatre Alibi, and Daddy Good is a community play, to be produced in April 2007.
Radio and TV:
Barnet, a sitcom, was broadcast on BBC 1; The Concert Party, a documentary, was broadcast on BBC 2. A total of twenty-five plays for BBC Radio 4 have also been broadcast in Germany, Switzerland, Australia, New Zealand, and Finland. Allen also wrote a highly successful series of comedy monologues, entitled "I Should Say So", for the actor Michael Williams That were broadcast on BBC Radio 4.
In between times Allen has been a theatre critic for The Guardian (West Country reviewer for twenty-five years), The Independent, The Stage, Plays and Players, The Buzz, Entertainment, Western Morning News, Big Issue, Theatre Magazine, Theatre Quarterly, Plays International, and has written features for The Guardian, The Independent, Western Morning News, The Telegraph, Sunday Times Magazine, Observer Magazine, Big Issue, The Stage, Nova, Time Out, The Observer, Daily Express, The Oldie, UK Writer, Strange Listings, The Finger and Words.
John Bramble taught Classics at Oxford before taking early retirement and moving to Devon to write. He's been engaged on a major study of Orientalism for several years. This seemed a tricky enough subject anyway, what with all the controversy about Edward Said, but wow did it get difficult after 9/11
