User:Cmnorton

Overview Stuff

This is the Wiki Page of cmnorton chief programmer for the Town of Arlington, MA. Arlington is a town of roughly 40,000 citizens located west of Boston, MA. Chief Programmer is not my real title, but that keeps changing from year to year, and Chief Programmer seems to cover my many duties.

I am responsible for programming, database and system administration, and anything Linux or whatever else is deemed should be handled by me, usually what is perceived as "yucky" stuff.

My duties include the sustaining engineering of a tax collection package (real-estate, motor vehicle excise, water, and parking tickets), which was designed and implemented in house about fifteen years ago. It and a separate cash management package are implemented in Informix 4GL RDS, C, and Perl. The database is Informix SE (standard engine) Likwise, I support an "uptake" (administrative) application for Council On Aging built from the the same "stuff" as the tax collection package and cash management.

Although I have played around with different Unix distributions since 1986, I had never been plunged into using Linux or developing for Linux unitl about four years ago, when we made a decision to move our SCO Unix applications to Linux. At one point about two years ago, I realized the only way I could be truly independent and handle my Linux duties well was to make Linux my primary desktop system. I've used Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 and 4, Fedora 6, and finally settled with Ubumtu, 6.06 and 7.10.

About a year ago, I also started preparing for LPIC-1 certification. I did this for one reason, to widen my Linux knowledge. It was difficult but worth it. I received my certification in August 2007.

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