Short Bio

I've been working as an independent computer consultant since 1993, for the last five years based in France. From 1993 to 2003 I ran a UK based Limited company which at one time had as many as four employees to manage. I now operate as a self employed person under the French tax regime.

This site brings together some of the technology and projects I've been working on over that time. Interesting to note that I've been using the Internet for the last 17 years!

Highlights

1987 - 1989: Developing the Siemens TCP/IP based network printer daemon for Sinix (Internet email address at the time was: dg@siesoft.co.uk)

1989 - 1991: Working for Siemens, Munich as a Unix Kernel engineer on ports of AT&t Unix 5.3 and 5.4 to Intel x86 architecture

1991 - 1993: Working for the Open Software Foundation's Research Institute in Grenoble as Unix Kernel Engineer. Worked on a port of the Andrew Filesystem to OSF Mach 3.0 with Purdue University. Improved Avie Tevanian's Memory Management Code by overlaying the linked list search structure with a splay tree - a self organising binary tree that moves frequently accessed items to the head of the tree. Whilst at the OSF saw a funky little hypertext browser system developed by Tim Berners Lee at CERN and decided to quit to create a start-up to exploit this technology.

1994: Set up 3Wiz, a World Wide Web design and programming company with David Griffiths. We established Virtual Estate, one of the first on-line estate agents in the UK.We sold out in 1995, which we thought would be the height of the dot.Com boom. Little did we know it would continue for another 5 years and reach highs, and then lows, that nobody dreamt of.

1994: Wrote the GDIT dynamic image generation program. My first brush with Open Source Software. This proved surprisingly popular being used in a range of Web based applications that needed to generate images on-the-fly. We had over 16,000 downloads on the 3Wiz server in a month.

1995: Wrote Go Web! (ISBN: 1850322511, International Thomson Computer Press). This was one of the first books covering Web publishing on the PC platform and even had a chapter on Java! Review by Roy Johnson

1995: Become a source licensee of Sun's Java release 0.89.

1995 - 1998: Worked as an Internet Technology Consultant for the QA Group. Wrote their Internet Security training course and rewrote their TCP/IP and Internet Introduction courses. Worked on a number of Internet Technology related projects. In 1996 I was part of a team who connected the African Development Bank in the Ivory Coast to the Internet via a VSAT link to New York. Don't be put off by the fashion, if you watch pop videos from the era you will understand.

Working in Africa in 1996

1998 - 2001: Went to work fulltime on Java technology. Implemented a 3 tier Java based configuration system for Racal Internet Services based on the COBRA Object to RDBMS mapper. Worked on the architecture and developed the server-side software of the Amstrad e-m@iler Internet telephone. Worked on the OneSwoop.com online car retailer project. Co-architected (with my excellent colleagues Yoram and Stephane) and developed the AXA Investment Manager's website (Capeasi) for managing client share portfolios.

9/112001: Sitting in the offices at Axa in Paris we knew it was all over. Axa were a major insurer of the Twin Towers. Henri de Castres, the boss of Axa decided to freeze the development budgets as a response to shareholder concerns. I actually came back to work on Capeasi in the fall of 2002 to integrate a voice-mail system into the Website.

2002 - 2004: Post dot.Com you either adjusted to the new reality or didn't work. I decided to specialise in the performance side of development and worked on the Education Ministry's Antares project, for France Telecom and most recently for Reuters. I also developed my own performance tuning product called x.Link. This takes modifies Java bytecodes as they are loaded by the Java Virtual Machine to insert hooks to generate timing information. This information can then be visualised using a Web browser connecting to a small embedded Web server. This is possibly the Open Source Project par excellence. Apart from the rocket science part of the Java bytecode engineering it basically assembles a range of open source packages.

More recently my enthusiasm for Open Source has cooled and I've become interested in the re-emergence of eCommerce over the Internet. Big Open Source projects have demonstrated many qualities, fast turn around to bug fixes and response to users which are not offered by the accountant or marketing driven business model.

I am currently working on a couple of projects including Search Engine Optimization tactics. I've recently written a short Perl script that uses the Google Web Services API to perform website ranking analysis.

Technology

Although I've been working with Unix (BSD 4.2) since 1984 I currently use Windows 2000 with no service packs applied as my day to day development system. I also have Mandrake Linux 8.2 installed and configured as a test system. I believe that Windows 2000 offers a reasonable compromise between reliability and usability. My system is connected directly to the Internet via a high speed always-on link. I have a firewall but do not regularly run anti-virus software or adware detectors. I do not normally use Internet Explorer and never use Microsoft mail products. I do not file share and am conservative in what software I run.

I actively use the following development languages Java 1.4, ActivePerl 5.0, C++ and PHP 4.2

I use the following development environments: IBM Eclipse, vi :-)