Paul Fisher

I'm a software engineering student at RIT. I row. I curl.

Find me elsewhere

I have a lot of website-type-things, and as a rule I keep them more up-to-date than I do this. Check out my Identipelago to find out where you can find what I've been up to, real-time, in painful detail.

Photography

Visit my Flickr profile to view photos that I take of things, like rowing, landscapes, and other things. Eventually I'll put a view of some photos here.

Recent thoughts

I use Twitter, mainly for my own personal amusement. I'm thetorpedodog. Don't expect deep insights. Do expect a naughty word or two every once in a while. I once started a feud between "The Office" star Rainn Wilson and a Boston housecat. Eventually, I'll also put a Twitter feed here, too.

Writing

Every once in a while you can catch me doing some long-form writing, rather than just silly toots.

Don't forget to _____! Collected advice on what "other things" you need to do to ensure your project's success.
DMA explained: If you've ever read about "DMA" and wondered, "What exactly is that?" I have an explanation.
SQL injection explained: So what is SQL injection? Again, I have an explanation.

Rowing

On my athlete information page RIT says I'm 6′ tall. I contend that I am only 5′ 11.5″. I row port, or left. Or right, because I face backwards in the boat. This is why we only ever call it port.

You might also want to read the team news, or look at the team roster.

SSE

I'm the co-Directory of Technology for the RIT Society of Software Engineers, along with Chris Hossenlopp. This entails managing the SSE web server and its many services, including the Zope/Plone–based website, mailing lists, the Subversion repositories, the Mercurial repos. I also occasionally get told to tell Kurt that the printer is broken or something. I developed the Mercurial management system (more below) especially for SSE but it's open-source.

Projects

I occasionally do projects for software engineering classes, SSE, or just for fun.

I developed a simple Mercurial management system to make it easy for students to set up a remote Mercurial repository and allow selected RIT students to push changes. This is an open-source system, which you are free to use and distribute under the GPL.
I worked for the RIT Open Printing Lab and developed a plug-in for the Moin Moin wiki system to transform collections of wiki pages into a book. It transformed page text into LaTeX markup, and turned that into a PDF. It hasn't been publicly released yet, unfortunately.
I've worked on several "Rapid Development Weekends" with the Society of Software Engineers, where we develop an entire application (or enough of one that we feel good) in a single crazy coffee- and Mountain Dew–fueled weekend. These projects are why I ended up deploying the SSE Subversion repository system.

Friends

I occasionally have a life outside of rowing and SE.

Kevin Kuchta: …is always up to something.
Chris Cowdery-Corvan: …is so ambitious it kind of scares me. And people love Chris Cowdery-Corvan! How much better does it get?
George Adams: George (W.) Adams (IV) is very tall and can slam out code like nobody's business.
Tom Rudick: …lives in my apartment. He knows a lot about Internets and "Web 2.0" and all that nonsense.
Nick Quaranto: …and I disagree on many things, including the best DVCS (Git vs. Mercurial), and preferred high-level programming language (Ruby vs. Python), but he's very smart, and he's got a lot to say.
Alberto Pareja-Lecaros: Facebook says that Alberto enjoys "being Hispanic". He's quite good at it, too.

Contact

I can often be reached over instant messenger, on Jabber, AOL Instant Messenger, and on Yahoo! at thetorpedodog, or MSN at thetorpedodog@hotmail.com.

E-mail: paul.fisher@mail.rit.edu +1 513 708 9079

219A Perkins Drive Rochester, NY 14623