User:TerryE
Terry Ellison
I am a maths graduate who has worked in the IT industry for over 30 years, starting in as a commercial programmer in my gap year before university. After graduating, I worked for a leading UK systems house and consultancy after graduating initially in mathematical and real-time programming (via the signal processing connection). I also led various embedded system and commercial system developments, and then worked up the development and services hierarchy to become chief engineer and technical manager of various business units. My company was acquired by EDS and for the 15 years up to 2007, I worked within the EDS organisation that was itself acquired by HP in 2008. The last three posts that I held were divisional CTO jobs. I am also an EDS Distinguished SE (this is an award given to the top hundred or so engineers in EDS).
My career was put on an abrupt hold in Dec 2007 when I went down with what is called CFS and became largely bed-bound. I was of little use to HP being bedridden and later housebound over a period of nearly two years so we terminated my employment in Oct 2009, and I have been semi-retired since then. The first few months of illness were truly terrible as I could barely get out of bed because of lack of enery; I had terrible muscle pains and couldn't think straight. However, with rest and supplements, I slowly improved over the next six months to the point where my brain worked fine periods of say 3 hours, so long as I largely stayed in bed and didn't do any daft like trying to walk 30m. In May 2008, I discovered by trial and error that I had a subtle gluten intolerance which had one small side-effect: it pretty much stopped my small intestine absorbing most minerals, vitamins, EFAs, etc. I've been on a wheat-free diet since then and have been slowly recovering. By mid-2009, I started to be mobile around the house and for the next nine months it was an up and down battle to exercise enough to recover the muscle mass lost in being bed-bound for 18 months. In Apr 2010, I pretty much 'turned a corner' and have steadily improved my mobility and stamina, returning to a more normal lifestyle.
During this illness, I have kept involved by contributing to various Open Source communities such as OpenOffice.org where I am the lead administrator on the OOo User Community website, and the VirtualBox.org User Forum where I help maintain this installation and also act as a moderator. These forums all use phpBB as their engine. I am also a contributor to Wikipedia. As a CFS sufferer, I came across Sarah Myhill's work and her website. I am currently working with her team to improve this service to the ME/CFS community by migrating her website to a Wiki format.
List of contributions
Current OOo Community Forum Work
phpBB3.0.4 Migration
(Activities now closed)
- Standardisation Strategy
- Detailed Implementation Notes
- Closed Issues and Actions
- Cache Tuning
- Cron Tasks
phpBB3.0.5 Migration
(Activities now closed)
phpBB3.0.7 Upgrade
This documents our upgrade from 3.0.5 to 3.0.7 and any follow-up actions:
phpBB3.0.8 Upgrade
Sorry guys but this one was very straight forward regression of our customisation into v3.0.8 with no real issues, so I didn't do a write-up.
phpBB3.0.9 Upgrade
This documents our upgrade from 3.0.8 to 3.0.9 and any follow-up actions. Note that these are the usual working documents to track forum specific issues for NL moderators and admins. I am doing this work as part of a wider OpenOffice.org migration from Oracle to Apache infrastructure as documented here.
Obsolete OOo Community Forum References
My Pages
- Current working draft based on Flossy originalDraft Constitution
- Proposed OOo User Community Roles
