User:Russell

From ReactOS

Hello, my name is Russell and this is page that contains information about me and my association with ReactOS

Contents 1 History 2 My Details 3 Abilities, Experience and Skills 4 Machines and Testing Hardware 4.1 Software 5 What I love about NT 6 External Links

History

I first heard about ReactOS from a friend on IRC, when I saw the project I was intrigued that a team of people who are extremely ambitious took on such a project. At that point I downloaded a copy and ran it on an old machine I had, I loaded a couple of programs to test and was impressed.

Currently, I guess I am deemed an unofficial/part time tester for ReactOS, I always test the latest svn if it contains important commits that affect the stability, reliability and/or (maybe later) security of the operating system. I am very new to OS development and not a good person to ask extremely technical questions about said development, I have a basic grasp of how an OS works on the most simple level. But not enough to have a major support impact on a project like this.

My Details

• Name: Russell Rice
• Born: 1985
• Location: Auckland, NZ
• IRC nick: Russell

Abilities, Experience and Skills

This is a list of what I have learned, hopefully I can be a bit more of a benefit to ReactOS in the future

• Programming
  • Languages: C, C++ and Delphi
  • Libs/APIs: Windows API, wxWidgets and SDL
• Documentation
  • Yeah right, updating todo lists count?
  • I comment code as much as I can!
  • Occasional bad wiki editor
• Management
  • Forum moderator
  • IRC channel operator

Machines and Testing Hardware

• Intel Core 2 Duo E6750 @ 2.666ghz
• 2gb of RAM
• Windows XP Pro SP2
• Purpose(s)
  • Various, testing ReactOS on VMware Workstation 6.02-59824

Note: I also have 2 spare machines at my disposal

Software

• Windows XP Pro SP2
• Windows 2000 Server
• Windows 2003 Server R2

What I love about NT

I find NT's design to be more elegant than most other OS's:

• Self documenting function names. - For example: NtReadFile() makes more sense than fread()
• Error codes ONLY returned from a function. - Some functions I've seen in NT pass parameters by reference for size values and only have error codes as a return value, I see this as the best way to do things, because having a function return bytes or an error code has quite a few problems.
• Tons more.. No time to write, but I am adapting these styles into my own code :)

External Links

• "The House of Rice" - A rather useless site where I rant, rave and do not much else.