Michael McCallister

Mike McCallister is currently a technical writing consultant with Compuware. He has run SUSE Linux desktops since 1998. The author of Computer Certification Handbook, his work has been published in publications including Linux Journal, Java Developer's Journal, Internet Voyager, and Isthmus. He is a Senior Member of the Society for Technical Communication and the National Writers Union. Jacques Beland has been a systems administrator on VMS, UNIX, and Windows since the early 1990s. He has worked with Linux since 1994, and installed his first Novell server in the late 1980s. He is co-author of SUSE LINUX Enterprise Server 9 Administrator’s Handbook.

Bud E. Smith

Bud Smith wrote his first book for Que about buying computers fifteen years ago—and had

to do his online research for it using dial-up Internet. Since then, he’s lived and worked in

Silicon Valley; London, England; Auckland and Christchurch, New Zealand; San Francisco and

Oakland, California, and written a dozen more books. And he does most of his online work at

broadband speeds—except when he’s using the Web on his cell phone, which is as slow as his

old dial-up modem. Bud runs a WordPress-based blog at RunawayDaily.com.

Michael McCallister is devoted to the idea that technology need not be feared and can be mastered

by anyone. He has been writing about technology in general, and open source software

in particular, for the whole of the twenty-first century, and part of the previous century, too.

He tries to help build the open source community, from which derives WordPress and so much

else that is good, true, and pure in life (the parts of life that run on computers, anyway). While

Bud has moved hither and yon, Michael has lived the relatively boring, stable life in the central

United States (Milwaukee, Madison, and Boulder). Michael has been running “Notes from the

Metaverse” on WordPress since 2006 at metaverse.wordpress.com. Find out more at www.

michaelmccallister.com.