User:Tertl3

--Tertl3 22:49, 23 July 2010 (UTC)


 * Name: William Blackburn
 * email: blackburn.william2@gmail.com
 * IRC Nick: @irc.freenode.net : tertl3
 * Location: Taylors, South Carolina. USA

About me
I have always been interested in electronics and software. Since I was a kid I have been a kind of software nerd. From playing video games to putting games on my TI-83 Plus calculator. Needless to say, this led to an interest in Linux and the Linux community. As for my interest in music, well, the story isn't much different.

I began playing guitar when I was a teenager. I went to the local arts school for my elective class and studied jazz. I have been listening too and playing music ever since. During my college years, I was introduced to Fedora and eventually, being a musician and a Linux user, I began to try combining the two. And, to my rejoice, I found the JACK application. It didn't take long for me to discover the real-time preemption patch. After using this for a few months my mind began to wander and I looked around for new things.

To my refrain, I found Nvidia's own CUDA. This is one really neat architecture that I don't fully understand as of recent. However they provide updated tools for the Fedora flavor and I have given up my rt tinkering to begin learning C, the language of Unix. Not only is this the language of Unix, but also the language of CUDA. CUDA is not limited to C, but it is very "C focused". I hope to be able to understand and write these types of programs within a few years!. Maybe sooner.

Current Undertakings
I have decided to begin writing an intro/tutorial on real-time preemption. The topic really peaked my interest so I decided to focus on real-time preemption for audio purposes and make this a document for someone who, like me, is a musician, but is also genuinely interested in real-time computing and wishes to gain a deeper understanding of the tweaks that are involved in turning the stock Fedora OS into a (soft)real-time Fedora OS. Since many of the tutorials I have read are not distribution specific, I thought this would be good place for me to begin contributing to the Open Source community. This page can be found here.