… the attic

Greetings! I’m Chris Hutchison, and you’ve arrived at my home webserver, run from the office in my loft, it’s original purpose at its inception in December 2005 having been to serve as a test platform for web sites I build (mostly for teaching and research, some commercial ones for friends) and as a personal mnemonic (with links) of the things I’m interested in.

A month or so on, I realised I could use these pages to share some of those interests with others, in particular my interests in free software, in education, in historiography and heritage studies, in ICT for development, and in next-generation web applications … hence your being able to read this now.

By the end of June 2006 a lot of my thitherto unrelated thinking had started to come together in what I’ve termed ‘The Big Picture’: confronting interesting questions in ICT4D, in development policy and development discourse, and in museum practice, and with the intuition that my background in cognitive science (linguistics, cognitive psychology, and cognitive anthropology) ought to nudge me in the direction of equally interesting answers, I was not unsurprised to myself compelled in the first instance to reflect critically on cognitive science as both theory and practice.

Originally written (using Quanta+) in XHTML with a decent splash of CSS and Javascript, the bulk of the content was moved across to this WordPress installation on 17th March 2006. The WordPress theme I am using on this site is one that I cobbled together from newspaper-like WordPress themes Daily Digest and Tabloid, and a RapidWeaver theme called Newzpaper.

The site variously runs off a Linux box or its backup Mac G4. For your interest, the toys in the attic are:

:: Environment ::

We’ve amassed a few computers over the years, but the core of our home network (including the kit in the loft) comprises:

Dell Dimension 8100 / Sabayon Linux 3.5.1
Apple Macintosh G4 / Mac OS 10.3.9
Samsung x11 / Linux 4 (KDE)
Samsung Q25 / Kubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn)
HP Compaq nx9010 / openSUSE 10
Toshiba Satellite Pro 4600 / Kubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn)
Apple Macintosh iMac G3 / Mac OS 10.3.9
Apple Macintosh Powerbook G3 / Mac OS 10.3.9 and Ubuntu 6.06
… and a half dozen other machines, none of which run Windows (this is a respectable household)