About the Authors

James Lee ([e-mail]) is a hacker and Open Source advocate based in Illinois. He holds a master's degree from Northwestern University, where he can often be seen rooting for the Wildcats during football season . The founder of Onsight (www.onsight.com), he has worked as a programmer, trainer, manager, writer and Open Source advocate. He is the coauthor of the recently released Hacking Linux Exposed, Second Edition (McGraw-Hill/Osborne, 2002). He has also written a number of articles on Perl for the Linux Journal . Mr. Lee enjoys hacking Perl, developing software for the web, reading, traveling, and most of all playing with his kids who are too young to know why dad's favorite animals are penguins and camels.

Brent Ware ([e-mail]) started out as an electrical engineer, then gave up a promising , well-paid, and boring career as an MSEE to go back to school and get a Ph.D in physics. After serving the requisite indentured grad student servitude in experimental high-energy physics searching for very small particles (University of Texas, BNL), he pursued the usual postdoc academic path , searching for very small ripples in space-time (Caltech, LIGO), followed by failing to find a tenure-track job, poverty, disillusionment , and worthless stock options in lieu of salary at a telecom dotcom in Seattle. He is now a scientist at Caltech/NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratories in Pasadena.

In passing, he has been exposed to multiple operating systems on a variety of computers, the great majority of which are now museum pieces, and their software fodder for trivia questions on comp.os newsgroups. Linux seems to be a keeper, and he hopes it will stick around no matter what happens to Wintel. In any case, Brent took a vow to only use * nix and emacs and LaTeX and never burn any more neurons on transient, fly-by-night alternatives. He has been an unpaid sysadmin over the years on a variety of different platforms and contributed to Hacking Linux Exposed .