Author: JT Smith
Open Source people –
Jeremy Bursky makes it very
clear that he is almost 15, which of course means that he is now only 14. I first met him at the Linux World Conference and Expo in New York City in February.
He told me then that he was 17. I figured he wouldn’t lie in
front of his dad. Of course, that wasn’t his dad and indeed, he was
maintaining the misperception of his age for the sake of registration which
required all entrants into the expo to be at least 16 years of age.
There were a lot of compelling characters to approach at the expo
but Jeremy stood out for his apparent youth. He was with his friend
Richie, to whom he later refers as his mentor. I kept pointing my questions at
Richie, and Richie kept passing them to Jeremy, and Jeremy would pause before
attempting to answer, a little overwhelmed by my fervent attentions or
by the fact that the year before he hadn’t had to lie because the age
limit was 12.
Most high schoolers have trouble seeing beyond the view out the
window of homeroom. How’d this high school freshman end up at any trade show, let
alone one so much less than mainstream?
I gave him one of my cards, and a few days later he was anything but
shy, emailing me to reintroduce himself and politely express his willingness
to participate. When we talk his voice sounds hoarse, as if it were tired
from the struggle to cast off adolescence and molt into manhood.
As early as when Jeremy was a sage 2, his dad plopped him in front of a computer. He
didn’t do much with it then but about six years later, when he was given one
of his very own, he took to it with ease. Now he has five machines and
maintains a total of 12 in the household he shares with his family in Nyack,
N.Y., about 45 minutes north of Manhattan.
It is remarkably suburban considering his father was in the original
Broadway cast of The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, his
mother earned a spot on the 1983 pop music Billboards, and his brother is
frequently auditioning for new shows to follow his appearance on
Nickelodeon’s, Games and
Sports.
Jeremy somehow emerged not as a performer but a techie. He opted
out of coding because it seemed so trendy. Instead, he’s identified network
security as the field of the future and spends countless hours
practicing by fortifying his family’s PCs.
He started using Linux about three or four years ago. He was at a
computer fair and kept seeing InfoMagic‘s Elfos on boxes. He thought it looked cool and picked it up, thinking maybe
it would be a good game or something.
It took him about 20 tries to first install Linux, Red Hat’s
version 4.2. He was 10 or 11 years old and trying to teach himself.
“I didn’t get it working for probably a year. I kept playing with
it. It was the partitioning. I had no idea about partitioning at the time. I
didn’t even know what a filesytem was. There wasn’t anything like a
nice utility to work with. I had to use the Linux F-DISK and that was
really hard because it was text-based.
“Back when I first tried making a boot disc to get into the
installer there was just one file I couldn’t get working. Finally when I got it
working and I saw ‘install mode’ come up I was just so psyched I got
that far that I just kept going with it, and finally when I got into it, I
was like, ‘oh this is pretty cool’ and ever since that I’ve been playing
with it and experimenting and doing different things with it.”
Jeremy started going to the Rockland
PC Users Group and eventually met Richie Stark at a user group
sponsored swap meet. Stark, who is a consultant for Arco Management, was impressed by
the homemade quintuple boot machine Jeremy was trying to sell. Now Jeremy
spends various weekend and vacation time working with Stark.
“One of the things we’re trying to do is use old computers, like 386
and 486 boxes, and run them as full scale routers, like NAT (network
address translation) boxes, and they’ll go do the Internet routing for like
254 computers on a sub net and it will cost us hopefully nothing to do
because the computers are so cheap. All we need are two network interface cards
(nics) and a 200 MB hard drive. And we’re going to install Linux on these. That’s what we’re doing at both our houses.
“At mine I have a cable modem. I built a router, we have a 386 and
25 MHz and a 90 meg hard drive, like the cheapest parts, cost us maybe
like twenty bucks. This thing is really nice, it’s routing every computer in
my house which is about 12 computers.”
In addition to working with Stark and maintaining the family
network, Jeremy is getting ready to try a BSD or two, teaching himself C++,
developing a Web design company called Intershock with his friend and peer Chris, and
looking into participating in the development of Open Source project MentalUNIX. It’s no wonder that his parents think he spends too much time
in front of the computer. Jeremy tells me, with a touch of pride, how his
dad, now director of business development and publisher of books and
directories
at Paperloop, got so fed up with
Jeremy’s fixation that he once “tore one of my computers out of the
wall.” But as we talk, I can hear Jeremy occasionally refer questions or direct
answers at his dad who is in the room while we talk. Though muffled by
distance, I can hear his dad’s voice in the background. He certainly
sounds amenable and no doubt he is thinking about the interest free loans he’s
granted Jeremy in the name of purchasing various components for his home
stations.
The profits from some of his ventures have helped to reduce his debt
a bit but with Jeremy’s birthday coming up he’s decided to leave the wish list
pretty short. Besides, like any soon-to-be 15-year-old, all he
really wants is to be old enough to drive a car.
Jeremy Bursky’s favorites
Favorite sports: snowboarding and fencing.
Most difficult class: French.
Thoughts on moving from junior high to high school: “The people are
bigger.”
Sample of Intershock’s work: Braincures.com.
Favorite movies: Matrix, original Star Wars series.
Pet peeve: Script kiddies.
Day he’ll be 15: April 29.
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Category:
- Open Source
