About me

So who the devil am I?

I live in Birmingham, West Midlands, UK with my wife Nicola and two children, Madeleine and Joel.
I work in the Intel Open Source Technology Center. I have worked on recipes for the Clutter Cookbook, documentation for Media Explorer, and documentation for the MeeGo SDK. I'm currently back to JavaScript programming. [Note: this site does not reflect the opinions of my employer, only my personal opinions.]
I like programming (JavaScript, Ruby, PHP, Java, and Python) and am an advocate of open source. I am familiar with modern web development (HTML5/JavaScript/jQuery/jQuery Mobile/jQuery UI/Sencha Touch etc.), and have had a long love affair with the web (I put together my first website in 1994; here it is in 1998). I am also a Zend Certified Engineer (this is a PHP professional qualification).
I enjoy watching comedy on DVD (A Bit of Fry and Laurie, Armando Ianucci, Nightingales, Extras, The Office, Father Ted, etc.), sf box sets (the new Battlestar Galactica, Survivors [the 1970s original series]), and old science fiction/Hammer horror films (The Abominable Dr. Phibes is one of my favourites). I also collect sf books, particularly avant garde stuff from the late '60s and '70s with fantastic covers (especially Pan); my favourite authors are Barrington Bayley, J.G. Ballard (R.I.P.), M. John Harrison, Barry Malzberg, Michael Moorcock, Robert Silverberg, and Christopher Priest. See what I've been reading or look at a list of some of my favourite books for more information.
I like gardening, and have a small collection of Mexican butterworts (a type of carnivorous plant), plus lots of succulents (my favourite plant group).
I have quite a large record collection; my favourite shopping websites are Bleep, Boomkat and Amazon.
In case anyone is wondering which Elliot Smith I am, I'm not the singer who committed suicide (obviously); I'm the one who went to Spalding Grammar School, then the University of Kent (to study English and Comparative Literature), then Canterbury Christ Church College (to study Business and I.T.), then the University of Birmingham (where I did an MSc. in Artificial Intelligence and a Ph.D. in Computer Science); in between, I worked for Canterbury Christ Church College in the art library, at Armada Computer Publications as a technical author, at the University of Birmingham as a Learning Advisor and Web Developer, at OpenAdvantage as an open source advocate, and at Talis as a Java and PHP programmer, mainly working on library software (OPACs, RESTful library services), including a significant stint on Prism 3.

Bits of me elsewhere

ODesk profile (outlines my professional skills).

BrainBench transcript (IT and programming skills self certification results).

Technical projects

Python code for posting Mozilla bookmarks to del.icio.us.

AxleGrease (aka ROROX), a Rails package for XAMPP for Linux, which I used to maintain (Passenger and better Ruby packaging has pretty much made it redundant).

s33r, a Ruby library for interacting with the Amazon S3 service. NB I have now deprecated this library as there is a better alternative: Marcel Molina's S3 library.

Flickrlilli was a Creative Commons search engine for Flickr, built using Ruby on Rails. Unfortunately, it broke, and Flickr introduced decent Creative Commons searches and it became redundant, so I let the domain and code expire.

I have contributed a couple of tiny patches to Rails (although they're tiny, I'm ridiculously proud of them).

I made one tiny commit to GNOME tracker. (Look ma! I can do a bit of C programming!)

I messed about with writing a Google App Engine triple store (for RDF), called hardfidget. You might find it interesting if you want to use Sesame or JDO on Google App Engine.

I made various small contributions to Moblin, MeeGo, and related projects like Mx.

I was vaguely involved with the Instant Rails project, but not very much.

I did some work on the XAMPP control panel for Linux. The source code is in XAMPP, but no longer maintained as far as I know.

I designed a website for Self Help Services in Manchester; they've now redesigned it while keeping my structure and the content I rewrote for them. I picked up the project through IT4Communities.

I used to work at the University of Birmingham, where I built the Online Vacancies System (ASP and MySQL); and the Prospectus Request Form, plus its attendant back-end system (again, ASP and MySQL, with a Microsoft Access front-end for the distribution centre). Both ran for about three years after I left the University, but now are no longer used. I also wrote the old Newscentre news and events software, but they don't use it any more as they have a new content management system.

I designed a website for my brother in law's business, Alljays Building Services. It's built using Drupal with a stock Garland template, Views and CCK.

Technical and academic writing

I co-wrote a book about Ruby on Rails, which didn't do very well, though it was reasonably well-received. (I think it was a case of timing: the book went out of date very quickly after publication as Ruby on Rails was in massive upheaval at the time [just before 2.0 came out].)

I've made significant contributions to the Clutter cookbook.

My contribution to the British Computer Society Annual Review 2006, Why you should care about open source.

My Ph.D. thesis - "Incoherence and Text Comprehension: Cognitive and Computational Models of Inferential Control"

A paper I published with my supervisor in AI Review 15(4): "Representation, Coherence and Inference"

Computing Incoherence from Schema Structure, a paper presented at the 3rd Annual Computational Linguistics UK Research Colloquium, 2000.