About
My name is Ricke Stauffer, Jr., and I’m a software engineer working in the Ann Arbor, MI area. I have had jobs coding in C#, VB.Net, VB6, VBA, ASP, PHP, Python and C++ against T-SQL, MySQL and Jet databases. Currently I work for a company called Servant Systems, coding mostly in VB.Net against SQL Server 2005, and I have become fairly experienced in Microsoft’s next step in the evolution of web services, Windows Communication Foundation (WCF). I have fairly extensive experience configuring and maintaining Microsoft Windows 2000 Server and Windows Server 2003 installations in small business environments (using RRAS, ISA, IIS, Exchange and a handful of other fun Microsoft acronyms to make life easier). I’m a huge fan of Linux, and run a Debian LAMP server out of the basement of my home. At the moment it’s running on an AMD K6/2 450 with 320 MB of RAM, and is hosting approximately 25 domains with email and database backends. How’s that for making the most out of a small bit of hardware? I’m a pretty big networking geek as well, and have spent a good amount of time looking at libpcap/tcpdump output in Wireshark (formerly Ethereal), as well as using nmap, ettercap, dsniff and others to generally prove that I could cause a lot of trouble if I so desired. I have about 5 Linksys WRT-54G(L)s floating around my house, all running DD-WRT and acting as VPN servers, wireless bridges, and other things that you’d normally pay a lot more money for.
The purpose of this blog is for me to give a little bit of a contribution to the Internet programming community. There have been more than a few times where I’ve found a solution to a problem, wondered why it wasn’t on the Internet already, and realized it probably wasn’t there because I, and people like me, didn’t put it there. Now I have a place to put my solutions out there. I won’t claim they’re the best, but they probably work. I certainly welcome comments from people who would like to suggest better ways to do things; I’m always willing to learn. Also, I can rant about things, like how much I don’t like Armada AR6 skis because of their shoddy construction (no, I’m not trying to affect search engine rankings via anchor text… why would you ask that?).