About

I’m a South London-based web application developer. I live with
Melissa and Jake in Streatham, just a stone’s throw from the Common.

If you think my name sounds familiar and one or more of the following applies:

  • you were at Eltham College school in South East London from 1977 to 1982
  • you were in or around Shizuoka City in Japan between the summer of 1987 to the Spring of 1989
  • you were studying at the School of East Asian Studies, Sheffield University between 1991 to 1997

then yes, it’s highly likely that this web site is operated by the person you remember. Hi, by the way!

This site really exists because of my continuing fascination with computers. After becoming tired of the restrictions and inadequacies of the Microsoft Windows operating system and of the malpractices of Microsoft itself, I decided that I could no longer justify or tolerate giving money to a company that:

  • treated me as a potential thief
  • supplied me with an operating system riddled with security holes
  • supplied me with an operating system the usefulness of which was compromised by a restrictive licensing agreement
  • supplied me with an operating system that (games apart) conferred few benefits over and above free alternatives
  • engaged in routine surveillance of my personal property and stored the results on the servers of an un-accountable, private organisation.
  • has engaged in and been convicted of monopolistic business practices
  • has a track record of attempting to scupper, compromise or
    otherwise subvert standardisation efforts and improvements in interoperability (and in doing so, has acted against the broader interests of its own customers and all other computer users).
  • actively attempts to undermine the perfectly legitimate social activity of collaborative development of unrestricted software, an activity from which I and many others benefit in manifold ways.

The usual response to complaints such as the above is “If you don’t like it, don’t use it”. I concurred and started to seriously explore desktop Linux in the form of Ubuntu’s Dapper Drake in the Autumn of 2006. After about six months of running Ubuntu in parallel with Windows XP, I finally swapped my development and personal computing environments over to Ubuntu on a permanent basis.

This move was without doubt the best computing decision I’ve made since purchasing my first modem back in 1995, or thereabouts. Thanks to the freedom of GNU/Linux, its network and programming tools, attractive and effective open source productivity software, and features such as Ubuntu’s awesome software repositories, computers suddenly seem exciting and packed with potential again. To anyone chronically tired of the restrictions and malpractices of the proprietary software vendors, vote with your feet. Oh, and if games are the problem, get a console for around the price you’d pay for a mid-range graphics card!

This site is hosted by WebFaction who operate a great service for open source software developers, especially those wishing to experiment with multiple languages and frameworks without the hassle and delay involved in submitting regular support tickets to their provider. Their very flexible and reasonably priced payment schemes, minimal account restrictions, automatic framework and application installers, unlimited applications, websites and databases, secure access to email and to server space via SSH and SFTP, plus their enthusiastic focus on open source development (especially Python, Ruby, Apache, PostgreSQL, MySQL, PHP, Perl, etc) mean that for casual hackers or professionals that need a low-cost place to experiment and play, they are hard to beat. If you know of a better service for developers, please let me know. (I should probably add that they they have more experience with Python and Ruby than with Perl or PHP, but don’t let that put you off.)

To contact me by electronic mail while confounding the spam bots, please build my address from the following assorted elements. You’ll need my domain name, which is of course ralpress.org. You’ll need my mailbox, that’s (no surprises) roger, and you’ll need to join them together in the prescribed way with an @ sign. Et voila!

Finally, if after reading anything on this blog you come to a less than flattering opinion of me or my views, then I suspect you will be interested in this.