Curriculum Vitae

My name is Sveinbjorn Thordarson. I am Icelandic by birth and citizenship. I currently live in the heart of Edinburgh, Scotland. I have hitherto spent a considerable portion of my life living abroad, mostly in Copenhagen in Denmark, and London and Oxford in England. I thus enjoyed the good fortune of being raised trilingual.

As of writing, I am a PhD student. My focus is on philosophy and intellectual history -- two fields that I work hard to master. I am also involved with computer technology, mostly software and web development. My other interests include literature, travel, films, politics, musicianship and the sciences.

What Am I Doing?

I am currently studying for a doctorate in 17th and 18th century intellectual history at the University of Edinburgh. In my spare time I work as a freelance translator, read books, develop software and imbibe mildly alcoholic beverages, in that order. I also watch the occasional film, travel and play musical instruments.

Contact Information

Via electronic mail:

Via traditional mail: Sveinbjorn Thordarson Öldugata 4 101 Reykjavík Iceland OR Sveinbjorn Thordarson Apartment 23 5 Drummond Street Edinburgh EH8 9TY Scotland United Kingdom

Via telephone: Iceland Mobile: (+354) 8610584 UK Mobile: (+44) (0) 7913775738

Computer Skills

I am open to offers of freelance software and web development work. You may thus be interested in taking a look at my skills profile below.

System Administration

• Comprehensive knowledge of UNIX-like operating systems, including:
  • Installation, administration and setup of Mac OS X
  • Installation, administration and setup of Linux, esp. SuSE, Debian & apt-based distros.
  • UNIX command line interface and environment, esp. bash, tcsh
• Working knowledge of generic computer hardware operation and setup
• Setup, configuration, optimization and administration of the Apache web server
  • Good working knowledge of mod_perl, mod_rewrite
  • Performance optimization
  • CGI configuration and deployment
  • Apple WebObjects
• Mail server administration:
  • Postfix
  • Stalker's CommuniGate mail server
  • SpamAssassin spam filters
• Solid background in TCP/IP networking
• Solid knowledge of Ethernet, FireWire, 802.11b/g networking
• Version Control Systems
  • CVS, Subversion and ViewCVS
• Web log statistics analysis tools:
  • Summary, Webalizer, AWStats (codebase contributor).

Software & Web Development

• Shell scripting (bash/tcsh)
• Perl programming
  • Considerable expertise and on-job experience
• Regular expressions (esp. Perl regex)
• Structured Query Language & Perl DBI API
• C programming - considerable expertise
  • ANSI C
  • Objective C
• Some experience with Java
• Unix programming (pipes, sockets, character devices, I/O etc.)
• Web programming
  • Considerable expertise and professional on-job experience
  • CGI protocols, HTTP RFC etc.
  • JavaScript, AJAX
• Web Design (see portfolio)
  • HTML
  • CSS layout
  • Firm grasp of web standards and website optimization
• API expertise
  • POSIX C APIs
  • MacOS X APIs Carbon and Cocoa
  • SDL cross-platform APIs
  • 2D bitmap blitting techniques
• Graphics work:
  • Adobe Photoshop (semi-proficient)

My professional experience is mostly with web programming, but I consider myself very versatile -- I can quickly become competent in any set of development-related skills.

In general, I would describe myself as a careful and meticulous programmer. I think my code speaks for itself. I prefer the ANSI bracket style to the Kernighan & Ritchie. I am equally at ease with object-oriented and procedural programming, although I have only little knowledge of object modelling theory

Languages

Icelandic

Skill: Excellent Native (1st) language Roughly 10 years of formal education

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English

Skill: Excellent 3rd language - learnt at age 9 Also 8 years of formal education TOEFL: 670/670 (100%)

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Danish

Skill: Excellent 2nd language - learnt at age 4 Also 7 years of formal education

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German

Skill: Poor 5th language 2 years of formal education)

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French

Skill: Poor 4th language 4 years of formal education

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Latin

Skill: Very poor 2 years of formal education

Thanks to my knowledge of Danish and Icelandic, I can also more or less read and comprehend Faroese, Norwegian and Swedish.

Translation

I have worked as a freelance translator since 2005. I undertake translations from Icelandic to English and vice versa. My clients have mostly been overseas translation agencies, amongst them Robertson Languages and Park IP Translation. My forte is translating Icelandic to English, although I am also skilled atEnglish-to-Icelandic translation. Although I mostly translate documents of a technical or commercial nature, I have also undertaken translations of prose literature, amongst them works by Guðbergur Bergsson, Linda Vilhjálmsdóttir and Guðrún Helgadóttir. I have also translated for the University of Iceland Science Web.

For details, see my translation page.

Formal Education

Basic schooling

10 years in various schools in Iceland, England and Denmark 1986-1997, age 5-15.

Junior College

Menntaskólinn í Reykjavik (2001) Modern Languages Line, 4 years, 1997-2001. Received the Bogi Ólafsson award for outstanding knowledge of English on graduation.

University

BA Philosophy, University of Iceland (2006) Studied philosophy at the University of Iceland and the University of Guelph from 2001-2006.

MSc History and Philosophy of Science, LSE (2008) 2006-2007 Masters Degree in the philosophy and history of science from the Department of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

MSc Enlightenment Studies, University of Edinburgh (2008) 2007-2008 Masters Degree in the history and philosophy of the 17th and 18th-century Enlightenment, in the School of History, Classics and Archaeology at the University of Edinburgh.

PhD History, University of Edinburgh (PENDING) I am currently studying for a doctorate in intellectual history at the University of Edinburgh. My thesis is on the role of teleology and design in nature in the theories of the philosophers of the Enlightenment period.

I have a wide range of academic interests, amongst them the history of philosophy, political and moral philosophy, philosophy of mind and language, the philosophical foundations of the sciences of man, intellectual history, Enlightenment philosophy and history, philosophy of science, history of science, historical methodology, logic and logical analysis, medieval Icelandic history, early modern European history, translation theory and semantics, the history of Britain and the English language, philosophy of history and literature, and cultural and literary history.

Publications

Translations

"Auðmúrinn Mikli" - a translation into Icelandic of Mike Davis' essay "The Great Wall of Capital" from his In Praise of Barbarians: Essays against Empire (2007), published in Ritið, April 2008.

"Ölkofri's Saga" - translation into English from the Old Norse Ölkofra Saga, author unknown. Published in the Icelandic Saga Database, 2008.

Employment history

• 1999-2002: Various jobs: manual labourer, gardener, hospital clerk, waiter
• 2003-2004: System administrator for Vefsýn hf., a web hosting and development firm. I worked mainly in the administration of Linux and Mac OS X web, database and mail servers, CVS and Subversion repositories, deployment of WebObjects applications.
• 2005: Some freelance IT work for advertisement agencies Hvíta Húsið and Íslenska Auglýsingastofan.
• 2005-2006: Software developer for FRISK Software International (Friðrík Skúlason ehf.). My work mostly involved the development and maintenance of an internal web-based database-driven sales administration system written in Perl and Python.
• 2006-present: Freelance translator.

I would also like to add that I have worked more or less as a self-employed pro bono open-source software developer from 2002 to the present day. See below for my involvement with open-source projects.

Open-Source

I am involved in the following active open-source projects:

• Platypus (project creator & maintainer)
• Mentat (project creator & maintainer)
• Sloth (project creator & maintainer)
• Tapir (project creator & maintainer)
• Explicit (project creator & maintainer)
• osxutils (project creator & co-maintainer)
• AWStats (contributor)
• iPodLinux (done some work on Podzilla modules)

I have also started or become involved in a number of other (currently inactive) projects. For further details, see a list of all my projects. I have had my software published not only on the Internet, but also in computer magazines and on distributed software CD-ROMs.

My most popular piece of software, Platypus, has been an Editor's Pick in Mac World magazine and is downloaded by thousands of people every month.

Other Projects

Music

I play the following instruments:

• Piano
• Organ
• Accordion
• Guitar

Other skills

• Good, up-to-date grasp of international politics and basic economics
• Extensive knowledge of the history of Western civilization from the Greeks to modern times, particularly 17th-20th century Western European history.
• Extensive knowledge of the history of philosophy.
• Extensive knowledge of European/American literature and philosophy.
• Extensive knowledge of Western films, music and culture.
• I am a decent cook

Personal

I am...

• unmarried
• childless
• nonreligious
• a smoker
• unaffiliated with any political organizations
• a regular contributor to Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopaedia
• Slashdot user #8688 ;)