About Me
Over twenty years working in the IT world has given me an extensive knowledge of the industry and exposure to a large number of products, platforms, protocols and industries. From starting out in 1987 as a PL/1 programmer on IBM mainframes moving in to PC/LAN administration gaining essential hardware, software and networking skills as Netware progressed through the years and integrating with Windows NT, then being invited to take on UNIX administration whilst employed by a software house in 1995. Using SCO Unix and HP-UX, I was sent to various locations worldwide including the USA, Asia, Africa and Europe on behalf of a software house to install and troubleshoot complex containerization software systems.
From there I moved onto team management, being responsible for a team of 4 running a large HP-UX system for major shipping line. After a few years, the decision was made to offer my services independently working as a self-employed contractor, I have worked as a UNIX/Linux System Administrator, Web Developer, a Networking/PC/Windows/NT engineer and 2nd/3rd level support desk engineer for ISP’s, major electronics and IT companies and Financial houses.
For the past 7 years I have been living in Den Haag, the Netherlands with my wife and two young kids. At home I have an active interest in IT and computers, maintaining a home network comprising of a diverse range of operating systems and hardware platforms. I enjoy using computers on a daily basis for both personal and commercial multimedia and web based projects.
Featured Projects
Lemonberry Page Protect
Page protect is a free, open source plugin for WordPress to provide a simple method of restricting access to a group of (non-Wordpress) users.
Multiple groups can be defined and re-used of multiple pages. The user controls allow change of password.
The administration page allows passwords to be changed, users to be added and groups to be defined.
Secure Data Exchange Platform
My most recent project was for a major international organisation in Rijswijk (Netherlands). My primary role was the development of a secure data exchange platform replacing traditional high volume mail based paper and CD exchange. read more…
wp:Manage
At Lemonberry, we needed a administration system for managing our clients and their (mainly WordPress) hosting account. read more…
Document Management with automatic OCR and translation
One of the problems with living in a foreign country and not speaking the local language very well is that it can be a pain to deal with bills, tax documentation, government correspondence and other post that comes through your door. My solution is an automated document management system that will translate anything that is scanned on our network scanner. read more…
HTML5/CSS3/jQuery MPD Client
After setting up the Linux based Music Player Daemon on my Raspberry Pi as my new front-room HiFi server, I looked around at the great number of clients available. I couldn’t find one that exactly suited my needs, so I wrote my own. read more…
Training video portal
A requirement was made to provide secure access to a collection of approximately 500 videos, roughly an hour each in length. The system should be web based, use the credentials of an existing client portal and be conservative on disk/bandwidth usage. Administrators should also be able to group videos and add/remove them. read more…
Lemonberry Content Management System
Back in 2008 I developed my own Content Management System (CMS) for Lemonberry as we had a need to provide our clients with websites where they could have a rich interface for keeping the content up-to-date, whilst keeping the stucture and design of the site to us. read more…
rtGui – a web based front end for rTorrent
rtGui is a web based front end for rTorrent – the Linux command line BitTorrent client. It’s written in PHP and uses XML-RPC to communicate with the rTorrent client. read more…
Employment History
European Space Agency
Short term assignment to
- Provision VMware ESXi Server running multiple Linux VM’s on IBM X Series hardware
- Consolidate several physical servers to new VMWare platform
- Deploy Zabbix Enterprise wide monitoring solution
Lemonberry Web & Graphics Agency.
- Web Design & Programming
- Technical Admistration
- Multimedia Production.
European Patent Office.
2007 – 2013
- Secure Data Exchange Developer.
- Linux Systems Administrator.
- Web/PHP developer.
Sun Microsystems.
2000 – 2001
- UNIX Systems Administrator, Internet Group.
AT&T.
2000
- Internet Engineer.
Intrum Justitia.
1998-2000
- UNIX Systems Administrator.
Samsung Electronics UK.
1997-1998
- PC Network Specialist.
Thru Transport Systems International.
1994-1997
- F/M Manger.
- PC/LAN Manager.
Queen Elizabeth’s Foundation.
1989-1994
- Computer Manager.
Capital Cameras Ltd.
1988-1989
- Assistant Manager, sales.
Legal & General Assurance.
1987-1988
- Technical Analyst/Programmer.
Recent Blog Posts
Fixing the broken “Open With…” command in Linux Mint/MATE
It’s annoyed me for a long time that when you’re using the Caja file manager in Linux Mint’s MATE desktop, the “Open With…” dialog is broken. read more…
Raspberry Pi 2 launched
Now this is good news – a new Raspberry Pi has been launched – quicker, more memory, more features. read more…
The history of the “Three Finger Salute”
Bradley worked on everything from writing input/output programs to troubleshooting wire-wrap boards. Five months into the project, he created ctrl+alt+del. The task was just another item to tick off his to-do list. “It was five minutes, 10 minutes of activity, and then I moved on to the next of the 100 things that needed to get done,” he says. Bradley chose the keys by location—with the del key across the keyboard from the other two, it seemed unlikely that all three would be accidentally pressed at the same time. Bradley never intended to make the shortcut available to customers, nor did he expect it to enter the pop lexicon. It was meant for him and his fellow coders, for whom every second counted.
How signal handling works on Linux and Windows
Versionpress – version control for WordPress in development
Possibly the best thing about WordPress is how simple it makes most tasks. Just log in to the administration, click here and there and boom, you have three new plugins installed, a new theme activated etc. People love this, and we do too.
There’s a flip side to it, however. Once the site is deployed and used by real visitors, those buttons actually become sort of a threat to the site because they make all the changes irreversibly and straight in the production. That is a problem because 3rd party plugins sometimes have bugs, are incompatible with each other, the theme might need updates etc. There are ways to deal with it but it’s a tricky job – so tricky that over 70% of WP sites in Alexa Top 1 Million gave up on updates.
Computer becomes first to pass Turing Test in artificial intelligence milestone.
A programme that convinced humans that it was a 13-year-old boy has become the first computer ever to pass the Turing Test. The test — which requires that computers are indistinguishable from humans — is considered a landmark in the development of artificial intelligence, but academics have warned that the technology could be used for cybercrime.
Apparently a milestone in computing has been reached according to the Royal Society in London. The Independent reports that a Ukrainian team has built a bot that has convinced 33% of the jury that it was human… read more…
Amazon Web Services Summit – Amsterdam 2014
I’m Looking forward to the AWS Summit in Amsterdam next week. To be honest I don’t know much about AWS so I’m going along to find out what it’s all about… read more…
What programmers say vs whay they mean
This made me smile…
Typographical twins: 20 perfect font pairings
Contrast, as the name implies, is about finding totally different, but still complementary typefaces that are each fit for their intended application. Traditionally, this involves pairing a serif with a sans serif. Typefaces will generally conflict if they are too similar: two ever-so-slightly different serifs or sans serifs rarely play nicely together.
As a designer, the important thing is to establish a clear hierarchy. This could be as simple as varying size and weight of the same typeface, but where the typeface varies, that’s where careful pairing is crucial. If you have a display face packed with unique personality, you’ll need something more neutral to do the hard work.
The Importance of Visual Content
An very interesting article from The Next Web talking about visual content in web design.
A picture is worth a thousand words, and when it comes to capturing your audience’s attention, you want to take full advantage of every chance to communicate your message. Short attention spans have made lengthy explanations less effective?
So how do you keep interest?
– Show, don’t tell….