About Deryck Hodge

I work as a Web Developer/Programmer and am Lead Developer for the Product Development team at Washington Post.Newsweek Interactive. I'm also part of the Samba Team where I maintain samba.org and news.samba.org (and a few other samba.org sites). I've taught on Google's web apps at LinuxWorld conferences and Usenix's LISA and am currently working on a book of the same material for Prentice Hall.

My interests are varied, some of which include:

Contact

Email is the best way to contact me. I use my Samba address mostly:

deryck [AT] samba [DOT] org

You can also post a comment on the blog here. I try to respond whenever I can.

Why the site name devurandom.org?

/dev/urandom is a random number generator in Unix-like operating systems. When I started this site, I was just getting into Linux for the first time, and a friend suggested the name when he sent me a /dev/urandom description from Linux kernel source. The quote, paraphrased, said that /dev/urandom is different from /dev/random in that it doesn't generate random numbers from entropy pool noise. /dev/urandom is better suited for large amounts of data, since it's not limited by available entropy. I thought the quote suited me -- you be the judge of why ;-) -- so devurandom.org was born.