Dez Moleski

work: mailto:dmoleski@clarityvisual.com
home: mailto:dez@moleski.com

My full name is Desmond Moleski, and I learned of WikiWikiWeb at the April 2002 meeting of the PortlandLinuxUnixGroup, at which WardCunningham gave a talk, and invited us to make a personal page.

Am I DoingItRight??

One of the things about Ward's history that resonates with me is his hiatus from Unix. I also started my career as a Unix programmer, slipped off to the Macintosh for a couple of happy years, and am returning eagerly via Linux after a long break where I mostly worked with MicrosoftWindows of pretty much every flavor.

I love the idea of AccidentalLinking.

On April 8, 2002, I set up my first WikiWikiClone, a UseMod Wiki at work to experiment with a Wiki as a place for some FAQ development, maybe also to annotate the miscellaneous files that have collected on our small company's servers.

I chose UseMod because it hews to the original simplicity of Ward's Wiki, while adding some extensions (like not needing tab characters to mark up text). Also I was attracted to the one-Perl-file implementation, and have hope of being able to extend it easily if I need to.

I looked briefly at TWiki, it looks great and super flexible but I wanted to get a Wiki up absolutely as quickly as possible.

If anyone happens on these comments and would like to offer any advice or comments about setting up a Wiki for intranet use at work, especially in a pretty heavily Windows-oriented environment, please e-mail me or leave your comments here:

Thanks! -- Dez

Companies, projects, languages:

ClarityVisualSystems: what we call digital visual messaging, essentially computer-driven signage, especially that which uses LCD projection display, Clarity's speciality. Lots of VisualBasic, a smattering of C and C++, recently lots of Linux system admin & scripting, Perl, beginning Apache and MySQL and just a smidgie of Macromedia Flash.
CIMLINC, Inc: EnvelopEngine?, a VB4-like interpreted, object-oriented Basic environment which was closed source but freely distributable, recently rediscovered (by me, anyway) as PhoenixBasic? for Linux. Some people pried the code from CIMLINC and are working on revising so it can be licensed as open source. Right on! We wrote it in Borland C++ 4.5 with heavy use of template classes, I'm looking forward to seeing the source again if they succeed in freeing it.
Park City Group, which I call Mr. Field's Software, since it started out as a department of Mrs. Field's cookies, run by, yes, Mr. Field, and made software to help run the cookie business. Turns out it was good for some other bidnesses, too.
Schlumberger Technologies, CAD/CAM division gave me my start as a professional programmer, let me make all my rookie C mistakes, and paid me to write code on the Macintosh while only very occasionally forcing me to encounter Vax/VMS and DECstations. Life was good back then.

Wiki Places:

Notes to self:

Reading list:

A quick hello from Desmond's brother, Martin.

Desmond introduced me to wikis years ago, but I didn't understand the beauty and power of the wiki until only this year (2006). Dez made some remarks on his frustration with his work wiki in 2004: http://www.open-mag.com/features/Vol_47/wiki/wiki.htm

mailto:moleski@canisius.edu

I'm back again to say THANKS to Ward and all of the folks who have made wikis such a great tool. I've worked on one for the Big-8 Management Board (Dokuwiki) and now and developing a MediaWiki installation for Ameliapedia. Dez didn't know what an avalanche he was setting off when he showed me this wiki!

Marty

January 27, 2009

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