Toivo Talikka lives in Sydney with his wife Maja, their son Mikko, and dog Marlo. Toivo has worked on applications based on Joomla! for two years and provided support at the Joomla! forum to reach the level of Joomla! Ace. His tips and observations can be found at his blog http://toivo.talikka.com.
Toivo's career in computing started in the early 70's in an air conditioned room filled with 7-foot-tall tape drives, hard disk drives looking like top-loading washing machines, paper tape, and card readers connected to a GE-115 computer. He punched his first assembler programs onto 80-column cards and had at his disposal 16 KB of ferrite core memory and 5 MB of disk space.
Toivo's expertise in Retail Point Of Sale systems gained at ICL Finland led him to work for the company in Australia, England, and Sweden. He returned to Sydney to work with NCR. Then Burns Philp offered him a position in Papua New Guinea in its Merchandise division, from where he moved to the shipping subsidiary and, subsequently, to Shipping's head office in Sydney. His next job was IT Operations Manager for a CBD law firm. After that, Toivo ran a one-man consultancy in Sydney for five years, helping clients in legal services, wholesale, and aged-care industries to manage their computer applications and networks. His company, Total Data Pty Ltd, provided remote systems administration, internet security, and onsite hardware maintenance and installations, covering both Windows and Linux servers.
For his own use, Toivo installed Linux servers and firewalls and got an introduction to Apache, MySQL, and PHP (LAMP), the tools he then used to write a web-based customer-billing application accessible from his Nokia cell phone. His interest in Open Source applications and Joomla! led to a full-time job as a web developer, responsible for websites based on Joomla!, its extensions, and their integration with web-based services, at one of the Australian subsidiaries of a French global company, Schneider Electric.