I'm willing to help!

Hello! For the last few months I've been looking for an open source project that I could get involved in, and after the discussion today, I think I may have finally found one. I've been sitting on the sidelines for a few months and not really activity participating, but it's time I change that. I am interested in joining the PHP QA team. I've talked to quite a few people here on IRC (my nick is Bunny), so I'm starting to learn my way around. Right now I'm living in a Windows-centric world, and have access to lots of different Windows 2000 machines. (No Windows 9x. It's a toy OS that squeaks when you touch it, and has no business being used as a production server.) Since I work with PHP both at home and at work under Windows 2000, and have easy access to VC++, I've been building PHP for a while now on my own. I got started messing with it at first to learn how to build modules other than what the Win32 distribution ships with, but quickly got into the testing stuff. I am very close (a few months to go) to getting my CS degree from Wright State University in Dayton, OH. (If you haven't heard of it, don't worry - no one else has either.) I've been using PHP since the early 3.0.x days, and write PHP code almost daily in my job. Our code at work uses objects heavily, as well as sessions... I've been writing HTML since the Mosaic 0.9x days. I am the network administrator for Mad River Local Schools, where I run a network of 1,200 computers. (70% MacOS, 30% Windows... that's changing, the Macs are slowly starting to be phased out.) Our network OS is NetWare 5.1. Our production web server is currently running Solaris 8/x86, but will be converted to Windows 2000 this summer. (I need access to a Win32-only ODBC driver.) I currently focus my testing in a few areas - ODBC and LDAP. I am fully willing to change this! All of the web servers authenticate against NDS using LDAP. My development platform is Windows 2000. I have quite a bit of UNIX (FreeBSD and Solaris) experience, but at the moment I'm living in a Windows-Centric world. All of our web servers run Apache/Win32. I have played with IIS+PHP+ISAPI, but found it very unstable and not worth messing with. The compiler I use is Microsoft Visual C++ 6.0 SP5. I'm interested in dealing with testing issues that arise on SMP machines. My production server is SMP, and one of my development machines are SMP. Other skills I have that might be useful include C/C++, Java and lots and lots of MacOS work. (I was a Mac tech during high school and my early college years. I haven't had a chance to play with MacOS X, but I'm dying to get my hands on a copy!) I have worked with MySQL and MS-SQL quite a bit as well. Interesting tidbit: I am in the process of learning American Sign Language... just because I want to. It's fun! =) I am willing to help with PHP on the Win32 platform in any way I can. I figured I should help get involved... I'm starting to get tried of seeing "Sorry, I don't support Winblows". While I have no formal QA experience, I'm more than willing to learn if any of the experienced PHP QA people are willing to teach me! In the interest of helping prevent issues like the 4.0.5 COM issue, I am willing to try to setup a server to perform nightly builds if no one else is. (ie, I have one of my computers suck down the current version from CVS, build it, and FTP the binaries to a server with more bandwidth than my 56k modem every night.) It may take me a while, but I believe it's possible to build VC++ projects from the command line... I hope you accept my "application" into the QA Team, and I'm ready, willing and able to help! - Matt