Mike Ohlson de Fine

Mike is a graduate Electrical Engineer specializing in industrial process measurement and control. He has a Diploma in Electronics and Instrumentation from Technikon Witwatersrand, an Electrical Engineering degree from the University of Cape Town, and a Masters in Automatic Control from Rand Afrikaans University. He has worked for mining and mineral extraction companies for the last 30 years. His first encounter with computers was learning Fortran 4 using punched cards on an IBM 360 as an undergraduate. Since then he has experimented with Pascal, Forth, Intel 8080 Assembler, MS Basic, C, and C++ but was never satisfied with any of these. Always restricted by corporate control of computing activities he encountered Linux in 2006 and Python in 2007 and became free at last. As a working engineer he needs tools that facilitate the understanding and solution of industrial process control problems using simulations and computer models of real processes. Linux and Python proved to be excellent tools for these challenges. When he retires he would like to be part of setting up a Free and Open Source engineering virtual workshop for his countrymen and people in other poor countries to enable the bright youngsters of these countries to be intellectually free at last. His hobbies are writing computer simulations, paddling kayaks in wild water, and surf skiing in the sea.