About me and this site

Hello, my name is Michael Starzinger and this is my website containing a personal blog. I’m a software engineer, open-source hacker, student and climber. In my opinion software should be free (as in freedom) and open (as in open-source) whenever possible. I am currently working on V8, Google’s high-performance JavaScript engine used in the Chrome browser. Prior to that I worked on CacaoVM, a Java Virtual Machine which uses Just-In-Time compilation, for several years.

The name of this site was chosen because ants, even though being tiny and limited as individuals, are capable of building impressive colonies by working together in a collaborative fashion. And also they are just cool.

How to contact me

I very much welcome you to share any thoughts or ideas you might have about this site or the stuff I’m rambling about. Please feel free to contact, follow, friend, ping or poke me in any way you feel appropriate. Below is a list of my identities on various social websites out there.

With all the fuss about the social web left aside, the best way to reach me is probably still to just write an e-mail. The below address can by the way also be used as a Jabber ID for instant messaging.

  • Drop me an e-mail:

For confidential information you can use your favorite kind of public-key cryptography solution to increase the security of your messages. The following public key data is available.

Technical trivia

When writing posts I like to use a simple and intuitive markup language so I don’t have to worry about styling issues. I stick with Textile which is both lightweight and humane.

The design for this website was handcrafted using mainly CSS level 2 stylesheets. There is one part, namely the rounded corners which require CSS level 3 properties. I called the Drupal theme “Ants” and am willing to release it if you are interested.

For everyday stuff I like software that just works and is open-source as well. That’s why I like Adium, Chromium, Colloquy and Cyberduck. Unfortunately I resort to using non-open-source software as well, because it sometimes just doesn’t suck. That’s why I use TextMate and Things as well. Of course to get some real work done, I just need to have a shell, some SSH sessions and my Linux box.