Dirk van der

Dirk van der Walt is an Open Source Software Specialist from Pretoria, South Africa. He is a firm believer in the potential of Open Source software. Being a Linux user for almost 10 years it was love at first boot. From then on Dirk has spent his available time sharing his knowledge with others equally passionate about the freedom and affordability Open Source software gives to the community. In 2003 Dirk started coding with Perl as his language of choice and gave his full attention to functional and aesthetic user interface design. He also compiled an on-line Gtk2-Perl study guide to promote the advancement of Perl on the desktop. As Rich Internet Applications (RIA) became more popular, Dirk added the Dojo toolkit and CakePHP to his skills-set to create an AJAX-style front-end to a FreeRADIUS MySQL database. His latest work is YFi Hotspot Manager. Today YFi Hotspot Manager is used in many localities around the globe. With many contributors to the project it proves just how well the Open Source software model can work.