Andrew DeFaria's Home Page

About me

Hello, my name is Andrew DeFaria. Welcome to my little corner of the internet.

Since June 2007 I've been living and working in Phoenix at General Dynamics. I've also set up a corporation, ClearSCM, Inc. which I conduct my business through. Check out the corporate web site!

I also managed to upgrade my car to a brand new 2008 Chevy Corvette! That's all the pictures I have of it so far as I lost my good camera and only have my cell phone camera. The car is wonderful with lots of power and creature comforts.

Last year I was working at Texas Instruments and moved from California, where I lived for some 20 years, back to Dallas. It was a lot cheaper to live there. I've had some health issues of late but am doing much better now.

Before moving to Dallas I was working at HP Information Lifecycle Management Solutions up in Pleasanton.

There are a few projects that I have been developing. I also want to put together some of my projects to document how they work and to show some of my programming skills (See Computers section).

Site news

This site has not changed that much lately. One thing is that I've been moving my business relate materials from this site, defaria.com to my new corporate web site, ClearSCM.com.

New web based email courtesy of RoundCube. Users with email accounts at defaria.com can now use this web base email application. Sign in with your username, password and use defaria.com for the server.

Whoppie! The new server is in and just about configured! Going from 333Mhz/64Meg memory to 2.2Ghz/512Meg memory really makes a difference!

Site changed to use SSL (AKA https protocol) so that most traffic is now encrypted. Granted this is slower but now I'm more secure! Note that some things did not work well with SSL turned on. For example, Gallery didn't like loading Java apps when under SSL.

Finally retired my old server and yanked the disk drive out putting it into my new server. Implemented backups so now my server is relatively safe and backed up.

Installed RoundCube which is a web base email client. Now I can read my email via a web interface. I wanted to use Zimbra but when I installed that it took over my email server, web server etc.

I wanted to get into and understand Wiki's, which are collaborative web sites or CMS (Content Management Systems), and decided to set up a wiki for Quicken. Plus the name QuikiWiki.com was just too cute to pass up! Plus my Unofficial Quicken Web Page (noticeably absent from the menu on the left) was too stale to be of much use anymore. I don't want this to be too much of a time drain on me. Wiki's have the potential of solving that problem because every account member has authorship rights for creating and maintaining the pages. The wiki engine I choose was TikiWiki and it has a ton of features like forums, FAQs and much, much more. Check it out!

If you use Quicken then sign up now and help us to build the best wiki for Quicken!

This site now uses Cascading Style Sheets and there's a lot more Perl and PHP going on. As you can probably guess I work in the computer field as a systems administrator. See my Resume for the details or see gear for a description of the gear used to run my site.

Music

And as the picture shows I'm a guitarist. Click on the picture to see a photo album of my previous bands or see Band for more detail. News flash! The cast of Cast of Shadows are working on new stuff. More on that when it arrives!

Photos

Of course one must have their Photos online for those who want to take a peek at you and your family. Pictures do help to get a better sense of another person. I have a whole bunch of photos arranged into albums using Gallery which is an open source PHP package for managing photos into albums on a web site.

Then there is the Family section which is basically about my daughter Danielle.

Car

At some point I need to fix up the section about my Corvette. Actually most of it is about my first vette and very little about my second one. Alas they are both gone now!

But true to the phoenix name, from the ashes arises a new Corvette! Alas it only highlight the need to further update the Corvette section...

Quicken 2000

I used to run the Unofficial Quicken Web Page but haven't been updating that since around 2000. There is still some good information in there though.

MAPS - My own Spam filter

MAPS, or Mail Authorization and Permission System, is my email filtering system. I get a lot of email - typically about 5000 emails a week! - and only about 1% of it is email that I want. Being bombarded by spam like that makes one protect themselves. MAPS will eventually be available for anybody to use but is currently still in development. Stay tuned...

Jokes

Jokes is just a section where I can put together various lists of jokes and funnies that I've found over the years.

Blogging

Also, I'm into web logging and learning Cascading Style Sheets so check out my Weblogs...