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
No Results Found
The page you requested could not be found. Try refining your search, or use the navigation above to locate the post.
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.
European Patent Office.
Thru Transport Systems International.
1994-1997
- F/M Manger.
- PC/LAN Manager.
Capital Cameras Ltd.
1988-1989
- Assistant Manager, sales.
Recent Blog Posts
A great success story: Migrating 15,000 PC’s from Windows to Linux
This was an interesting read from the Linux Voice site – how the city of Munich in Germany migrated 15,000 PC’s from Windows to Linux, and saved money in the process. Even Steve Bullmer got involved pleading to make them stay with Microsoft!
Steve Ballmer tried to convince our mayor that it would be a bad decision to switch to open source, because it’s not something an administration can rely on. But some members of the city council said: what are we, if one member of a big company simply comes here, and he thinks he can just switch our opinions?
Happy Birthday BASIC – 50 years today!
10 PRINT "HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME"
20 GOTO 10
read more…
Scientists “freeze” light for an entire minute
In what could prove to be a major breakthrough in quantum memory storage and information processing, German researchers have frozen the fastest thing in the universe: light. And they did so for a record-breaking one minute.
This is truly amazing… and one of the many steps on the way to a future generation of light based computing.
https://themindunleashed.org/2014/02/scientists-freeze-light-entire-minute.html
Computing has changed in 50 years
A very interesting article in Ars Technica today – a look back at 50 years ago to the time when IBM created the mainframe that helped send man to the moon. It’s incredible how things have changed since then, and almost unimagineable what the next 50 years will bring us. read more…
Jasper – voice control for Raspberry Pi
Now here’s an interesting project – Jasper is a voice control platform powered by the Raspberry Pi. My immediate thoughts are extending my Music server to have voice commands – I like the idea of saying “Pi, play music” to my living room for an instant response. read more…
Hip Hop Virtual Machine (HHVM)
HHVM is an open-source virtual machine designed for executing programs written in Hack and PHP. HHVM uses a just-in-time (JIT) compilation approach to achieve superior performance while maintaining the development flexibility that PHP provides. read more…
Flashback to 1986
I’m so pleased that I came across an archive of Popular Computer Weekly magazine on Archive.org. I found one of my contributions from when “I was a lad” back in the 4th December 1986 issue – it’s a tip on how to rescue your Commodore 64 BASIC program if you’ve hit the reset switch or typed “NEW”. read more…
Why is Facebook blue? The science of colour in marketing
Why is Facebook blue? According to The New Yorker, the reason is simple. It’s because Mark Zuckerberg is red-green colorblind. This means that blue is the color Mark can see the best. In his own words Zuck says:
“Blue is the richest color for me I can see all of blue.”
Not highly scientific right? Well, although in the case of Facebook, that isn’t the case, there are some amazing examples of how colors actually affect our purchasing decisions.
Super computing with 40 Raspberry Pi’s
This incredible creation is a cluster of 40 Raspberry Pi’s all linked together to create a “mini super computer”. read more…
WordPress co-founder on keeping up-to-date
WordPress co-founder Mike Little loves the things designers do with the software he helped invent. But, he tells David Crookes, they really need need to keep abreast of platform advancements