My name is John Ruble (hence the domain name). I'm a CS major at Purdue University.

I like computers, games on them, movies, camping (linear camping with a backpack, also called 'backpacking'), skiing, and lots of other stuff I forget about until the opportunity arises to do.

As for the techinal aspects of the site, it's written in html with CSS, powered underneath by PHP (which some say stands for Paying Homage to Perl), and uses a mySQL database for the blog, chatterbox, logging, and such. I do all my editing in simple text editors. In the past I used notepad, but most stuff on this site was done in pico, or the GNU variant, nano (which doesn't break when you hit ctrl+s). I'm also a fan of nedit. Update: I've finally become a disciple of vim.

Computers. Here we go. I am fortunate to have a geek for a dad, so we've had a computer as long as I remember, and I tinkered on them before I had my own. I don't remember when I first built my computer, but I do remember that I bought new from an online store both my Cyrix PR120 processor and my S3 ViRGE video card (the only card ever to be dubbed a graphics decelerator, as its hardware 3D functions were slower than most sofware renderers). I salvaged a Soundblaster 16 PnP ISA as well as my 2GB hard drive from the computer shelf, which has since become the computer closet. I've upgraded parts here and there since then, never replacing everything at once. Currently I have:

• AMD Athlon FX-53
• 1024MB Corsair XMS RAM
• DFI Lanparty nF4 SLI-DR
• XFX 6800GT
• 74 GB WD Raptor
• 300 GB Maxtor SATA
• TDK VeloCD 24x
• Soundblaster Audigy
• Lian-Li PC65USB case

Some pictures (prior to my newest upgrade) can be found in the LED Case Lighting article under cool stuff. I currently dual boot between WinXP and Ubuntu GNU/Linux.

I also have a couple macintoshes, though one is old and the other older. I wrote a guide about installing linux on the G3 Server.

I like Tablet PCs. For a couple special classes my senior year I was lent tablets - a really nice IBM and an okay-for-the-price acer.

You can find my resume and such here.