Quick Facts
Biography
Daniel J. Barrett (born 1963) is a writer, software engineer, and musician. He is best known for his technology books, his work with progressive rock band Gentle Giant, and the imaginary computer game BLAZEMONGER.
Writing
Barrett has written a number of technical books on computer topics. The most well-known are Linux Pocket Guide and SSH, The Secure Shell: The Definitive Guide. His books have been translated into Czech, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Mandarin, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish.
Corporate use of MediaWiki
Barrett, author of the book MediaWiki (ISBN 978-0-596-51979-7), has received media coverage for his deployment of MediaWiki in corporate environments.
Gentle Giant
Barrett has been active in the resurgence of 1970s progressive rock band Gentle Giant from the 1990s onward. He created the official Gentle Giant Home Page in 1994, and though it began as a fan site, it was adopted by the band and is listed as the "Official Gentle Giant website" on the band's CD re-releases.
In 1996, Barrett compiled a 2-CD set of their songs for PolyGram entitled Edge of Twilight.
Humor
In the 1990s, Barrett created the concept of BLAZEMONGER, an imaginary computer game that spoofed the computing industry, and wrote approximately 100 articles about it.
In 1988, Barrett wrote and recorded the song "Find the Longest Path," a parody incorporating an NP-complete problem in computer science and the frustrations of graduate school. It has been played at mathematics conferences, incorporated into several YouTube videos by other people, and independently performed by a choral ensemble at ACM SIGCSE 2013. Computer scientist Robert Sedgewick ends his algorithms course on Coursera with this song.