Greetings, and welcome to the main site for Douglas Needham. I am a computer engineer originally from Ohio, with over 20 years experience with various flavors of UN*X and nearly as much experience with the Internet Protocol (IP) and other Internet standards. Over the past two decades, I have worked for institutions such as Ohio State and Ohio University, as well as for major international corporations including Lincoln National Corporation, CompuServe, OCLC/IDI and Lucent. I also made my living as a computer consultant, a change made somewhat involuntarily, but which turned into a full-time position as a systems engineer for a Bay area start-up, working remotely. Unfortunately, most start-ups have growing pains, and I was laid off once again in January 2008. The upside of this is that I am now working at the Parallel Data Lab at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.

My main Open Source project of interest is NetBSD, which I have been using since before 1995, and have been contributing to as my employment situation permitted. In addition, I have recently become interested in a group of projects, including Zope, and the Plone content management system which runs on top of it. These two projects are what I am using for this site, but unfortunately, the versions in the NetBSD pkgsrc collection are severely out-of-date. As a result, my main efforts right now are towards updating the pkgsrc wrappers for Zope, Plone and other Zope products, and areas of this site are setup for downloading and discussing the work-in-progress, as well as reporting bugs. However, to see those areas and be able to download my latest results, you will need to register. The reason is in part that I want to make sure you are aware of the risks involved and realize that the ultimate responsibility for using any OpenSource work is yours. Let's face it...all software has at least one bug, and often hundreds. It is just a matter of whether or not a given bug has been found, documented sufficiently, etc. And all I am doing is is collecting software together so that you may more easily use it.

You can also learn more about Zope, Plone and why I use them instead of some other package by reading my About this site, where I discuss some of the particulars.

NOTE: This site is still under the earliest stages of development. Due to "Real Life (TM)" causing me to have to spend a considerable time dealing with family issues (including the after effects of my now 84 year old father falling on July 19, 2005, and is passing almost exactly a year to the minute a year later, after being hospitalized on May 1, 2006), I have not been able to spend much time working on things such as customizing this web site, my pkgsrc work, or NetBSD as a whole. As a friend puts it, my service level agreement (SLA) is such that things like family and work have a much higher priority level. And so, I have much customization yet to do to get it to anything approaching what will eventually be its final state. BUT I have finally gotten back to things somewhat, and will be doing do even more once my brother and I complete our roles as executors of Dad's estate.

SPECIAL NOTE: Given some troubles in my life during late 2006 and early 2007, I set out to get a confirmation on a suspicion I have had for some time, and which grew significantly during that period. That suspicion was that I am an Aspie...someone who has Asperger's Syndrome. This was confirmed in July 2007, and I have come to suspect that many programmers and engineers such as myself have AS. And given how hard it is to find good information out there, I have decided to put up a special section on it, including links to things I have found helpful. Please take the time to look at what I put in here, follow the links, and in general learn about AS before you come to any conclusions. Who knows... you may just read some articles which help you in recognizing things about yourself.