Hellooooo! It’s my first post to Ye Olde Planet Wherein All Things Jabber Reside, so I thought an introduction would be in order. For the many, many, many, many readers (ok, two) of my blog who may be wondering who I’m talking to–click above.

Ok, that done with, here we go:

My name is Hal Rottenberg. I live near Atlanta, Georgia, USA with my wife and two children. I work at Hewlett-Packard, and the really short description of what I do there is “system administrator” in our IT outsourcing division.

I’ve been using Jabber for a while now. If I had to assign a date to it, I’d say since the summer of 1978 or thereabouts. Or perhaps later. Some might (more accurately) describe the time I’ve spent as “a few years”. I’m somewhat of a software junkie. Once I wore out ICQ and it’s bastard cousin ICQ Groupware (which was left for dead by AOL), I found Jabber. I then began a whirlwind tour of all of the Jabber clients available at the time. Most were immature, but I kept checking back. I tried pretty much every Windows client, several Linux ones and several multiplatform clients. I counted once and it was like 20.

I finally settled on Psi. I began to get involved in the community and eventually, after removing the competition, I became the webmaster for the project. I’ve been around a while over there, and like to think (don’t shatter the illusion) that I have a fair say in how the project progresses. My compatriot and the real maintainer of the project is Kevin Smith. There are subtle differences between us. They mostly revolve around the fact that he can code C++ and I am challenged to spell it. (That’s not really true–I’m an excellent speller.)

That’s the hobby part. While my day job at HP has nothing to do with Jabber, we do run an 80,000 (with 4 zeroes) user license JCS server from Jabber Inc.. (We do some pretty neat LDAP & AD integration with it too.) I try to stay abreast of what the team that runs that server does. I have also made friends in the group that has a partnership with Jabber Inc on some co-branded products that HP has spent development dollars on and sells as a service. On top of that, I have joined the JSF as a member, and I quasi-officially keep an ear open there to see where HP can fit in.

Ok, I’ve hit the high points. Carry on.