User:Grin

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Original intro[edit]

I used to be an insignificant disturbance on Wikipedia, looking around, touching objects and observe the feeling.

Probably this has been changed since I got involved in resurrecting Hunipedia, and fixing several Hungary related articles here and there.

I am a significant disturbance on The Open Directory Project where I mainly disturb all the Hungarian categories, like World::Magyar and Regional::Europe::Hungary. I happened to wikicise Hungary in Ward's Wiki as HungaryCountry which offers a different kind of view on the country.

You guessed right, I'm a citizen of Hungary, a Computer Engineer, Programmer, Writer or in one word, a Geek.

All of the true things that I am about to tell you are shameless lies. -- Bokonon (from Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle)

grin 09:55 Apr 14, 2003 (UTC)

A bit more[edit]

My name is Gervai Péter, I am Hungarian.

My main area is (are?) computers, mostly internet access and service providing, security, network design and programming. My machines are in my windows free zone and I passionately feel sorry for those who pay money to make themselves slaves for that inferior and evil thing. I personally use Linux (mostly the Debian kind, but I acknowledge that *BSD, MAC, Amiga are excellent as well), and this may be concluded from the trails and signs I left on the Internet, like the #linux.hu iRC channel. (I used to work with OS/2 which was excellent compared to windows but nowadays it doesn't fit the end user, or even the provider.)

I started real communication around 1991, some Hungarian fellows may remember LifeForce BBS which was among the pioneers in Hungary. Then FidoNet came where we became a true, intelligent and interesting subculture while the Hungarian Internet still were crawling on all fours towards an unknown destination (which is now very well known as "hell", the final evolutionary destination of the internet).

Apart from that "unfortunately" I'm interested in almost everything (apart from some truly ugly topics like politics), which results wasting my time on new areas and topics every time, like Mozilla Open Directory (which is now as open as the main safe of bank of new york [UPDATE: it's gone in 2017]) or the website some call Wikipedia (since 2003). Apart from that I sometimes write articles on my webpage or in (computer oriented) newspapers. This completely covers the 26 hours of a day (while I allocate some more time on family, sleeping and vegetative functions).

I liked the idea of Wikipedia when I first met with it (I was looking for some information and Google repeatedly offered the same-looking website, and the informations were always useful), and I sadly realised that the Hungarian part were created and left to its own devices, having filled with mixed vulgarity and crap. This was hurting my - virtually non-existent - national feelings (or rather my taste), so I have fought for creating the Hungaropedia which used the "new" mediawiki software (phase 3, if anyone remembers the change) and I tried (and often try) to handle the content in a way to prevent idiotic or completely worthless pages to appear. I believe that if others see high quality articles then they will be eager to write even better ones and it became even better and even larger until it will contain Every Useful Knowledge And Then Some More, and I contribute to the Universal Happiness, apart from fulfilling the vast needs of my ego.

I am an active OpenStreetMap contributor (since 2008) and community (dis)organiser. I am often involved in Wikipedia and OSM-related legal affairs. I also happen to take care of a few hundred servers, routers, and various kind of electricity-consuming stuff.

Unfortunately my available time is very limited, so having such amount of responsibility often results only fixing broken things and starting useful things, to show the way to those masters who stand on my shoulders.

In the real world I am older than 18 but not yet 99. (Considering life expectancy and caused effects of the amount of idiots on the net I may never be.)

I remember 13 digits of pi. (Some people really care about details, now, don't they? :))

Net.Personality[edit]
Web.personality[edit]

Found about myself on the web...

  • 1990, graduated high school [2] See? I can prove it! :-)
  • 1984-1999, BBS sysop, FidoNet node (and OtherNets nodes), moderator
  • 1996, ObjectREXX course (OS/2)
  • 1995(-2003), IRCNet #linux.hu channel [3]
  • 1997(-2000), CsaTolna association ative member[4]
  • 1998, The Chain-mailers' Training Course (unfortunately I never had the time to translate this page, which became one of the most influent hungarian webpage about chain-mail sending idiots)
  • 2000(?) around, Debian developer [5]
  • 2000, Domain mud fight: [6] and [7] (hungarian, about the reformed .hu domain system and those who thought otherwise)
  • 2003, Hungarian Wikipedia



Work and tidbits of me[edit]

Licensing and other shitty lawyer stuff[edit]

I multi-license all my article contributions, (so none of my user pages, talk pages and their subpages), as described below:

Multi-licensed with the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike License versions 1.0 and 2.0
I agree to multi-license my text contributions, unless otherwise stated, under Wikipedia's copyright terms and the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license version 1.0 and version 2.0. Please be aware that other contributors might not do the same, so if you want to use my contributions under the Creative Commons terms, please check the CC dual-license and Multi-licensing guides.

Rest in Pacem[edit]

The rest is just fluff.


I am urging to start the hu.wikipedia.org, see Meta:User:grin for further info. -- grin 09:31 4 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Yee-haw! [It works]!

I try to collect the secret page about hungarian editors.


Accents test: árvíztűrő tükörfúrógép ÁRVÍZTŰRŐ TÜKÖRFÚRÓGÉP (8859-2 or utf-8)


Welcome to Wikipedia! It's always good to have someone to break up the US/UK/Canada/Australia contributor list. :) Check out Wikipedia:Help and the Wikipedia:FAQs for help, and the Wikipedia:Village pump to ask questions. -- Stephen Gilbert 13:32 Apr 17, 2003 (UTC)

Thanks. I've actually been through with most of the FAQ and introductory materials (they're really verbose and take ages to read, I bet I was the first :) fortunately good organised), but it's a good advice anyway. I already met parallel editing and removing stupid change in my text, and a friendly merge of my mistakenly double submission.
I'm trying to cast life into hu.wikipedia.org but pretty hard to get a reaction from the gods it seems. grin 14:21 Apr 17, 2003 (UTC)

I happen to make changes on |these articles.

I happen to work on some, too.

user:grin/tmp

timwi inserts these [1 E10 m²|93,030 km²]]

user:grin/Monobook.css


Identity crysis[edit]

Committed identity: 87b8259a12263cd8c3f93964be61ec28fae7ba333596cc98680a4aa277be5e80b2ae6d7d9df1e3224f79ed952373e1a20614231ad06f921614c446b48d38a214 is an SHA-512 commitment to this user's real-life identity.