Welcome to Standa Opichal's website

Who am I? My actual name is Stanislav Opichal. Standa is the most common abreviation used in my home country.

I was born and have spent most of my life in Czech Republic. At this time I am living with my wife Lucie in Massachusetts, USA.

My master degree in Mathematical Informatics (in 2000) comes from the Computer Science Department of Palacky University, Olomouc, Czech Republic.

I work for a company called Systinet where I have been having the chance to participate in the SOA Governance enterprise software platform development. Since its foundation in late 2000 we have gone through the whole Software stack implementation based on sockets through REST/SOAP Web Service communication up to Business services, contracts, their governance and management. In Jan 2006 the company was aquired by Mercury Interactive Corporation. It has been great experience I must say!

My computing environment of choice is an open-source platform. Even though it is my job requirement to run a MS operating system I run Linux at the same time in a coLinux virtual machine.

I am a proud member of JAY Software group which is my spare time programming hobby. It is related to Atari computers world. However as there is very little of functional Atari HW left and there are no HW vendors we know of today (since late 2000), a few of us put together a complete MC68040 CPU based Atari system virtual machine. ARAnyM includes features like HW graphics acceleration, OpenGL, networking. During that quest I have learned a lot about not-only-HW virtualization which is becoming more and more important in the business world. I have also learned about code portability, various platform specifics and many other topics. It is quite an advantage when you can run all operating systems of your choice at once on a single machine. This old Atari world is extremely valuable in helping to understand the great open-source spirit. Open source or, perhaps even more importantly, open standards mean possible continuity and ensure no vendor lock-in.

As I am a great fan of Google search I might try introduce myself in that light as well. To find more information about my activities you can try to look for me using this query or perhaps more in a professional life light, like this. Not only as a computer guy I have a great respect to Murphy's laws.

Besides computers I like sports in general. I like to play squash, tennis or simply going outdoors. I did some competitive ballroom dancing in the past. I won't refuse good food or a trip around the world.

You can also have a look at my complete CV in case you are interested.

Feel free to contact me at opichals@seznam.cz.