I was born in 1982, graduated high school in 2000, and left college early so that I could marry and enter the workforce.  My professional career started with Burst.net in 2001, where I learned some of the ropes of the webhosting industry.  Later on, in late 2002, I founded GrokThis.net.  Much later, in 2006, I devised the VPS Village brand, in 2008 I opened fonomo.com, and 2009 yet-another url shortener: 6o.to.

Besides being an entrepreneur, I'm a Linux/Unix systems administrator and programmer.  I do most of the work, from top to bottom, for my companies, with a notable exception of billing & accounting.  I find pleasure in exploring and experimenting with new technology, which is why my goal at GrokThis is to provide a wide range of cutting-edge solutions.

Throughout the past 15 years, I have been dabbling around with a few open source software projects. A few are worth mentioning. From 1999 through 2001, I worked on the Quakeforge project, a derivative of the GPL'ed Quake gaming engine. During my involvement, had (re-)ported the popular game engine to the Solaris/Sparc and Irix/MIPS platforms, and maintained the PowerPC port. In 2001, I ported OMS, the first Linux-based DVD player, to the PowerPC architecture. In the early days of the Cairo graphics library, I introduced an SDL demonstration to aid game developers in rendering SVG graphics. Today, my demonstration is still included in the Cairo package and has been used as a basis for SVG support in several SDL applications, including Tuxpaint. In 2003, when XFree86 first announced support for truecolour, animated mouse cursors, I wrote and released a script to convert cursors from StarDock's popular CursorsXP program to XFree86's cursor format. This immediately made a wide library of truecolor and animated cursors available to Linux/Unix users. This script was featured in LinuxWorld, the book Linux Desktop Hacks, has been forked numerous times, and is included in several Linux distributions.

A few highlighted projects I've worked on, professionally: I've developed two network monitoring systems, lead development of a datacenter management and billing system, contributed to an in-house email tracking system, wrote a web-hosting control panel, developed a binary package manager for the iSeries' PASE environment, developed a Pidgin instant messenger plugin for Fonomo.com

Currently, my development efforts are concentrated on Cloud::Infrastructure. Cloud::Infrastructure allows the development of end-user or web applications build directly against infrastructure services through a standard client library, the creation of unique infrastructure services, to layer billing, accounting, and localized AAA features onto other cloud infrastructure platforms.

My online handle with most online services, where I have accounts, is 'ewindisch'.  Here are links to my applicable *personal* profiles on major social networking sites:

• Facebook
• MySpace - I do not use MySpace. The "Eric Windisch" from PA on there is not me.
  
• Twitter
• LinkedIn