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Jos Kirps BiographyI was born in Luxembourg, a small country in Europe, on June 21 in 1974. I grew up in Bettembourg and Berchem and went to an elementary school in Crauthem. Later on I attended the Lycee Michel Rodange, a college in Luxembourg city. At age 15 I got my first computer, a Commodore 128D. I wrote several programs and software libraries for the C128, including a GUI and a windowing library, a VIC/VDC converter and a hierarchical file system. At the age of 17 I bought my first guitar. Soon I played in a band, we called ourselves "Burning Black" and we were quite horrible. Somewhat later I played in a college band called "The Backyard". After the band split up I started my first metal band, we first called ourselves "Black Reign" and later "Morbid Noise". I also planned to produce a horror movie with two friends around that time - I wrote most of the screenplay, but we never began production as we didn't have the required money. In 1994 I finished college and I didn't really know what to do. So I went to the I.S.T. (now part of the University of Luxembourg) to become a software developer, but soon I quit as I realized this was not what I really wanted to do. To earn some money I worked as a replacement teacher for some months, I liked working with kids and so I started pedagogical studies at the ISERP (now a department of the University of Luxembourg). In 1994 I also joined the well known local band Pagan Lorn. Band members were Sascha Georges (vocals - the guy who's now doing the news on RTL Luxembourg TV), Patrick Hurt (Keyboards), Vladeta "Vlatsch" Maksimovic (bass) and Stephen Misquita (drums). Today I'm still running www.paganlorn.com and you can download all Pagan Lorn recordings and the Beaufort concert video for free on that site. Around the same time I also started studying graphics design and soon I worked as a freelance designer for Linster Studios, the largest recording studio in Luxembourg run by the locally well known producer Jang Linster. I did a large number of covers and booklets for local acts such as Olio Galanti, Fausti, Trei Sei, Ernie Hammes, Buffalo C. Wayne, Pagan Lorn, Born, the Ministry of Education and many, many more. In 1998 I began working as a teacher in Roeser (Luxembourg). From 1998 till 2002 I operated my own 24 track recording studio at my home in Berchem, producing several projects. The studio featured a 32 channel inline desk, 2x8 channel digital tape recorders as well as 8 channel computer recording using Logic Audio. In 1999 I also started work on my first 3D animation movie called Stag Wards, which was released in 2001. In 2000 I created my first major software project called OLEFA, which was a Content Management System (CMS) with advanced user and database management features. The first websites to use OLEFA were www.kirps.com, www.mensa.lu and www.kacom.lu. In late 2000 I was one of the co-founders of Mensa Luxembourg (www.mensa.lu). During the following years I also acted as member of the board and vice-president of Mensa Luxembourg. In 2001 I added wiki and online library management features to OLEFA and used it as backend for our new roeserschool.lu school website. Roeserschool was the first school website in Luxembourg to feature advanced online collaboration features. In 2002 I co-founded the EducDesign company with Pino Fiermonte and Frank Trierweiler. EducDesign distributed OLEFA on the education market and the software rapidly became the most popular educational web platform in Luxembourg. While working as Chief Innovation and Technology Officer at EducDesign I was leading the software development unit and I designed all major concepts of the OLEFA software, including the OLEFA webbook, storyboard, fileserver, AFELO and much more. I was also responsible for most of the promotional designs and marketing concepts. In late 2006 I started a new software project called CorneliOS as EducDesign was not really open minded when it came to modern software development or management techniques. CorneliOS is available as free software released under the GNU General Public License (GPL) and it's much more advanced than OLEFA. In mid 2007 I launched Galaxiki, a wiki galaxy consisting of millions of stars, planets and moons editable by its community members. The project gained great worldwide attention, it was website of the week in Linux Journal USA, website of the day on Yahoo!, About.com, Pocketlint, redOrbit and many more. Galaxiki is based on the CorneliOS webOS. Shortly after I released the Joopita Web Directory, which is also using CorneliOS technology. Around the same time I had to turn down a job offer from Google as I didn't want to relocate to Zürich (Switzerland) because of my wife and kids. In 2008 Galaxiki was one of the SEOmoz Web2.0 award winners, it was 2nd in the category games and entertainment. I also did a quite interesting interview with Dave Prowse who portrayed Darth Vader in the original Star Wars movies. In mid 2008 I left EducDesign after I felt that I was heading into a completely different direction than the rest of the company. Today I'm no longer involved in the current development of OLEFA or AFELO. After leaving EducDesign in 2008 I returned to my former job as a teacher, this time in Ehlerange (Luxembourg). Shortly after, the Smithsonian Institute/Washington DC, one of the biggest educational institutions worldwide, reused and published some of my work regarding technology, chip design and computer history. In late 2008 I started to rebuild my recording studio, which became operational in 2009 and shall be finalized in 2011. I hope to be able to release first music projects somewhere in 2011. In 2009 I created CIOS, a Perl framework that allows to build collaborative websites and web applications using CorneliOS core technology. In 2010 social networking features and an app engine were added to the CIOS framework. CIOS is now powering Galaxiki, the Joopita Web Directory and other web projects. It is part of the CorneliOS package and it's available as free software under the GPL. In late 2009 I decided to start working on new educational concepts, this project is progressing really well and it will probably be reused worldwide on various education markets including the US and Canada, Scandinavia, DACH as well as Australia and New Zealand. Probably I'll start a sidekick project for the luxembourgish market too, although I'm not really sure about this yet. In June 2010 I co-founded Joopita Research a.s.b.l, a non-profit organisation focusing on the development of Open Source software and Social Networks. Joopita Research is now responsible for the future development of CorneliOS, CIOS, Galaxiki and further upcoming projects. What's next? Well, we'll see, still have some interesting stuff in the pipeline... My interests
- quantum physics, astrophysics & cosmology - system theory & chaos theory - agile management, agile development, process optimization - computers, hardware, software, development - education, learning processes & intelligence - music, music production & sound engineering - art, graphics design & marketing - unsolved mysteries, including James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake |
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