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About me

So who the devil am I?

  • I live in Birmingham, West Midlands, UK
  • I work for Talis as a Java and PHP programmer, mainly working on library software (OPACs, RESTful library services). [Note: this site does not reflect the opinions of my employer, only my personal opinions.]
  • I previously worked for OpenAdvantage, as a Business Analyst; my main role was as an open source advocate; this basically meant I worked in I.T., helping people adopt open source technologies where appropriate; we did this through seminars, training courses and consultancy with SMEs (mainly IT companies).
  • I spend a lot of time evaluating/installing/configuring software packages, but not much time programming; as I like programming, I do a bit in my spare time, mainly with Ruby and Python (which are fun), PHP (which is practical), and Java (which is right and fair); I am interested in software development methodologies, design patterns, agile development, XML, web services, and lots of other things. I am also a Zend Certified Engineer (this is a PHP professional qualification).
  • I don't relax much, but when I do I enjoy watching comedy on DVD (A Bit of Fry and Laurie, Armando Ianucci, The Mighty Boosh, Nightingales, Extras, The Office, Father Ted, etc.). I also collect science fiction, particularly avant garde stuff from the late '60s and '70s with fantastic covers (especially Pan); my favourite authors are Barrington Bayley, J.G. Ballard, M. John Harrison, Barry Malzberg, and Christopher Priest.
  • 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 websites are Bleep, emusic (I'm on their highest subscription rate!) and Amazon.
  • I don't have time to do much else, but in the time I do have I am developing my side business mooch labs.
  • 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, and at the University of Birmingham as a Learning Advisor and Web Developer.

Bits of me elsewhere

My LinkedIn profile.

My Flickr photos.

My Last.fm profile.

My Facebook profile.

My ODesk profile.

Technical projects

Flickrlilli, a Creative Commons search engine for Flickr, built using Ruby on Rails. Unfortunately, it's broken at the moment, pending me fixing or rewriting it.

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

AxleGrease (aka ROROX), a Rails package for XAMPP for Linux, which I maintain.

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.

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

I am vaguely involved with the Instant Rails project.

I did some work on the XAMPP control panel for Linux.

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 have been running since before I left the University about 3 years ago. 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

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.

Townx X: an explanation

See this page.