About Alta Alta dot Elstad at Sun dot com
I am a technical writer for Sun, anxious to help make your experience with the Solaris OS as productive as possible.
I have a particular interest in helping you navigate, understand, modify, and write new device drivers. I can provide resources and gather the wisdom of other kernel programmers. Tell me what you need to know. Tell me what is lacking or confusing in the Solaris developer documentation.
Volunteer Work
Since at least 1990, I have been working with the San Jose State University Expanding Your Horizons Conference. I have worked on the organizing committee, I have led workshops on Basic programming, HTML, and Javascript. Most recently, I lead a workshop on wiki editing. I am disappointed that most of the girls seem to have nothing to say and want to do nothing with their space except post pictures. I am considering changing the workshop again next year - maybe rLogo.
Side note on wikis. I have found wikis to be enormously useful for sharing information. The down side of course is that people with no useful information to contribute derive pleasure from vandalizing other people's work. Both the EYH wiki site and some of my articles on the genunix.org site have been vandalized. I'm sorry some people are so small minded. Come - be a contributor instead!
I also run the long jump pit at the local city-wide youth track meet in May and the regional Hershey youth track meet in June. In August, I put in as much time as I can at the San Jose Jazz Festival.
My latest big volunteer activity is working in the VITA program as a volunteer income tax preparer for low-income people. People who do not itemize and are low income should not have to pay someone to prepare their taxes. When they prepare their own taxes, they often do not take all the credits that they qualify for. Helping these people get a little more money back in their pockets has been very satisfying.