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## About the Authors

Jesper Kjaer Pedersen was born and has lived all his life in Denmark. Currently he lives in the city of H. C. Andersen together with his girlfriend Anne Helene, who studies communication at Odense University. In September 1998, he got his master's degree in computer science from Odense University.

Jesper has always been very fond of computers, but, in contrast to many others, he'd rather make the computer work for him and make it easier for others than play games. Examples of this are this book on Emacs and the open source software program called The Dotfile Generator, which he created. Jesper has used UNIX since early 1990, when he started at the university, and has used Linux on his computer since 1994. Jesper is the founder and chairman of the local Linux user group at Funen.

While Jesper studied at the university, he also worked as a student programmer, where he maintained the UNIX system (especially the Emacs installation) and wrote The Dotfile Generator. The idea for The Dotfile Generator came from users who asked questions regarding their Emacs setup. Nowadays, the Emacs module is outdated because Emacs itself offers customization using graphical widgets. You can still use The Dotfile Generator to configure several other programs, including Procmail, tcsh, and Bash. In his spare time, when he's not in front of his computer, he enjoys doing jujitsu and listening to music from the '80s. In the future, you might expect to see much more work done on The Dotfile Generator or a book on Emacs extensions. You can get more information about Jesper or The Dotfile Generator from http://www.imada.ou.dk/~blackie.

Jari Aalto , a software engineer with Nokia Telecommunications, is an experienced Emacs user who has helped develop numerous Emacs packages, including 60 of his own. He is currently developing an Emacs tool set, Tiny-Tools. Jari maintains several book-like documents such as the Procmail Tips page. He is also a veteran UNIX shell, Modula, Pascal, C, C++, awk, and Perl programmer whose modules can be found from http://www.cpan.org.

When Jari is not hacking away with Emacs, he enjoys ballroom dancing and passionate Argentine tango. For his listening pleasure and weekend relaxation, he plays flamenco with his guitar.

Charles Curley lives in the western part of the US, where he rides herd on two horses, two dogs, a cat, and several computers that run Linux, Windows NT, and Windows 95. He uses Emacs on all of them (well, all the computers, anyway). He has been programming and otherwise playing with computers for 20 years. Much to his surprise, he frequently gets someone to pay him to do it. Groups that have encouraged him this way include the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Colorado Memory Systems, Alpha Technologies, Hewlett-Packard, Maxtor, and an obscure operating systems company in Redmond, Washington, which is trying very hard to compete with Linux (at least that's what it said in its defense at the antitrust trial). He also worked briefly at Weyerhaeuser, but gave up trying to port Emacs to a tree.

He co-authored a book about TCP/IP administration on Windows NT and has published articles on the Forth programming language. This makes him one of the very few geeks who can write both software and actual human language.

Eric Ludlam is a software engineer at The MathWorks, Inc. where he has taught classes for beginning and advanced Emacs users. He has authored several tools included in Emacs for the Free Software Foundation, such as gtalk, Speedbar, and checkdoc. He has over five years of experience in GNU-related projects.

Eric lives in Massachusetts with his Emacs-using wife, Amy, and two Emacs-abusing cats. His current passion is building replicas of medieval siege engines, such as trebuchets, for use in pumpkin-throwing competitions and high school physics demonstrations.

Larry Ayers lives on a small farm in northeast Missouri with his wife and teenage son and daughter. He operates a portable sawmill, does general woodworking, raises sheep and shiitake mushrooms, and does computer consulting from time to time.

Larry discovered GNU software several years ago and has used Emacs and Linux ever since. When he's not beta-testing software he enjoys playing the fiddle and guitar. During the warmer months he spends time identifying and propagating rare prairie plants.

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