User:GRAHAMUK

Contributor since about March 2003. A native of the United Kingdom I now live in Armidale, New South Wales, Australia with my partner and two cats, four chooks and two ducks.

Potted life story

I was born on July 1st, 1962, in Bedlington, Northumberland, close to Newcastle. My family moved to rural Gloucestershire when I was 6, and then to Tewkesbury. In 1973 we moved to Hemel Hempstead. On leaving school in 1978 I worked for a company manufacturing radiotelephones, gradually becoming a RF design engineer. I later took these skills to other companies, though gradually became increasingly involved in software engineering. I moved back to Gloucestershire, in the Forest of Dean area in 1986. In 1991 went to University of East Anglia in Norwich, further studying electronics design and technology. After graduation I moved to Coventry, where I worked as a computer programmer, developing a software package for Microscope image processing called Openlab, running on the Apple Macintosh. In 1998 I moved to High Wycombe and worked for Citrix Systems, which I didn't enjoy at all. After a period of self-employment, I decided to emigrate with my partner to Australia, and here I am....

Interests

My interests include professional ones such as electronics and computer programming, and hobbies such as classic cars, photography, music, foreign travel and aviation. I've always had a keen interest in science and engineering, though more on a practical rather than an academic level. Having always had a particular interest in aircraft and flying, I finally (after several false starts over the years) gained my Private Pilot's License in 1999, flying for fun since then. Until moving to Australia I owned a classic HPF Firenza "droopsnoot" which I restored and used for exhibitions and track days. Back in the 80s I also did a lot of car rallying, both as driver and navigator, but sort of grew out of it - my last competitive event was as navigator on the Circuit of Ireland Rally in 1996. In contrast to those environmentally unfriendly pursuits, nowadays I am increasingly interested in sustainable housing and solar energy, and now living in rural Australia gives me an opportunity to put some practical hands-on engineering skills to good use in that direction.

Having grown up during the 1960s and 1970s, much of my cultural references are rooted in those eras, particularly music. While I try to keep an ear out for good, interesting new stuff (and occasionally find it), I still find myself listening to lots of stuff from the 70s and early 80s. Typically for a 41-year old, I find most modern mainstream stuff to be incredibly dull, repetitive and completely lacking in originality. My favourites and influences (in no particular order) include David Bowie, Led Zeppelin, Simple Minds, U2, Energy Orchard, The Beatles, Michell Shocked , Andy White, Glam rock, ABBA, Sinead O'Connor, Sarah McLachlan, Mary Black, Folk rock, Pink Floyd, Fleetwood Mac (early), Boo Hewerdine, Kraftwerk, 10cc, Afro Celt Sound System, Leftfield, All About Eve, Big Country, Blondie, Brian Eno, Dire Straits, Crowded House, Dodgy, Gordon Giltrap, The Jam, Jethro Tull, Kirsty MacColl, Level 42 (early), Manu Chao, New Order, Morcheeba, Queen, Steve Harley and Cockney Rebel, Tangerine Dream, The Sundays, The Waterboys... Latest discovery (a year late, but better late than never): Tenacious D - those guys rock!.

Computing

I started with computers as a result of being an electronics engineer. My first encounter was probably the Commodore PET, in 1979. It couldn't do much and frankly it didn't interest me that much at first, but fellow engineers at work were enthusiastic about the growing computer phenomenon and gradually it rubbed off. I was probably more interested in the idea of using a microprocessor as part of an electronics project, but the programming task (assembly language) seemed difficult to learn at that time so it took a while before that happened. In the meantime I played with a ZX-81 I borrowed - again it couldn't do much that seemed worth doing. Things changed with the Commodore 64 I bought in 1982. With much more powerful graphics than either the PET or the ZX-81, it started to grab my interest. I learned BASIC but rapidly realised it wasn't fast enough for really cool stuff so I bit the bullet and learned 6502 assembler. I wrote some not very good games, and a few hardware related projects such as an EPROM editor and programmer unit. This bridged the gap between hardware and software and moved the major focus of my electronics design work into the software domain from then on. Professional projects followed initially based on the 6502 and later the Intel 8051 CPUs. Using BASIC I also wrote a simple flat-file stock control database on the TRS-80 4P "portable" that we used at work, and some exhibition display stuff on the C-64. By early 1985, I was frustrated with what could be achieved with C-64 style graphics, various projects were mooted but the hardware wasn't capable of realising them. The company I worked for bought a few IBM PCs to support the embedded work we were doing, but these struck me as largely similar to the TRS-80 and no more capable, and lacking colour, not even as cool as the C-64 for graphics. I was whinging about this and was overheard by our marketing manager, who came over and plonked down a funny-looking all-in-one machine on my desk. It was a Mac 128K. Skeptically, I played with it for 20 minutes, and was hooked. MacPaint and MacWrite blew me away, the graphics were far superior to the other machines I had available (despite the lack of colour). I knew I had to learn to program it, then I could finally get to do some of the projects we had thought of. Knowing BASIC already, I bought Microsoft BASIC for the Mac, and wrote some quite good stuff with it (on a Plus by then), including a complete simulation of one of the products we were proposing. Prior to this simulation, management were skeptical about its benefits - by showing them a working system without having to spend a penny on R&D (most of the simulation was written in my own time in fact), the benefits became clear to everyone, and the project got the go-ahead. BASIC was OK, but I was never completely happy with using it, I knew more power was locked up in there somewhere. As a result I got the company to buy Turbo Pascal for the Mac, and started to teach myself Pascal. This was loads better than BASIC, and I quickly assimilated it. I wrote a number of applications related to my job using Pascal. Moving jobs allowed me to leverage this to a much greater extent. I went to work for a company creating exhibition displays, some of which required sophisticated computer control. I introduced a Mac SE/30, programming with Turbo Pascal to do all of the non-trivial displays I created for them. We also hired a number of Macs for these displays, and also found lots of other uses - the boss bought one for himself and they also found their way into the drawing office as cheap CAD workstations. Borland decided to drop Mac support around this time, so I was forced to jump ship and learn another language - C - instead. This proved to be very worthwhile in the long run. On leaving that company I returned to university for three years to get some more paper qualifications, and while there extended my knowledge of C to include C++. My main project was a general purpose computer architecture simulation package written in C++. By then I had bought my own Mac - a IIsi - they had become just about affordable to me by then. On graduating I went to work for a company called Improvision, at the time a start-up, and was their first non-founding employee. I was given the task to develop from scratch an entire image processing package for acquisition and analysis of microscope images eventually named Openlab. This work took five years, though sales began after three, propelling the company to huge growth and success. In parallel to this work, I privately developed the free MacZoop C++ application framework. After five years of solid work I felt rather burnt out, and left to take a break and pursue other interests. After a break I went to work for Citrix Systems, at first working on their Mac client, but then got moved to the "skunkworks", researching some of the low-level server stuff. This was my first exposure to any form of Windows as a programmer, and kernel level, NT server stuff at that. I loathed it. Compared to the Mac it was 100 times more difficult to program, with no IDE and poor documentation, not to mention the special techniques required to debug code at the driver level. Frankly I was well outside my comfort zone, and the whole episode was painful and disappointing. On leaving, I set up as a contractor and was re-employed by Improvision to do the Mac OS X version of Openlab. Which brings us more or less up to date. I'm unapologetically a Mac person, and while I fully recognise its faults especially in its "classic" incarnation, I have rarely had anything but a positive experience on the platform, both as a user and a programmer. The same cannot be said for Windows, which generally frustrates and baffles me as a user, and does not inspire me as a programmer. That said I'm not really a Mac zealot, many times Apple themselves have frustrated and baffled me! It is sad to have watched Apple fritter away their clear advantage over MS-DOS and early versions of Windows with poor decisions over the years - at one time (maybe about 1991) it really looked as if Mac could do it, but of course they then blew it. Glad to see Apple back on their feet and OS X is such a strong product, though it will never regain all that lost ground. These days I own an iBook which I mostly use, as well as a G4 desktop Mac. In between these and the IIsi I owned a Performa 5300, which appealed to me for its similarity in concept to the orignal Mac, but tended to disappoint with its performance. Professionally I always had the latest and greatest available at the time, so using these slower machines privately didn't bother me too much.

Aviation

I've had a keen interest in aviation since I was very young. At one time I thought I would join the RAF, though I grew out of this notion during my early teens. When living in Gloucestershire, I was inspired by the regular appearance of military jets over the area I lived in, including practice displays flown by the Red Arrows when they were based at RAF Little Rissington . On moving to Hemel Hempstead, the military jets were replaced by civil airliners flying out of both Luton Airport and the slightly more distant Heathrow. At age 11 or so friends and I would cycle to Luton to watch the jets come and go - those were the days of Court Line and fairly interesting stuff such as the De Havilland Comet, Bristol Britannia, BAC 1-11 and smoky old Boeing 720s. We also biked over to nearby Leavesden aerodrome to watch smaller GA stuff. My first flying experience was aboard a Douglas DC-8 to Canada, at age 13. I didn't fly again until the 1980s, doing various trips for work or holidays. My vague ambitions to become a pilot didn't materialise for quite some time either, mainly for financial reasons. I experienced gliding for the first time in 1986, and enjoyed that immensely. Around the same time I tried a few trial flights in microlights, and also greatly enjoyed that. Microlighting seemed to offer the best opportunity to get airborne, and at the beginning of the 1990s, I started to take a few lessons. Circumstances changed and I was forced to discontinue that, but on going to UEA in 1991, I joined the student gliding club and did a bit of that. It was hard to maintain momentum due to other commitments, weather and so on, so progress with gliding was a rather patchy. Nothing much happened for the next few years as I was so wrapped up in work, but in 1999, I decided to do a full PPL course once and for all. As it turned out, I made rapid progress, flying from Wycombe Air Park . I went solo at 11 hours in a Cessna 152, and passed my General Flying Test at 55 hours. I then added a night rating, and converted to the Cessna 172, in which I have undertaken many subsequent flights, both solo and with passengers. In many ways the actual business of flying, especially in the UK, is fairly bureaucratic, and perhaps not quite the same as the fantasy one imagines as a non-pilot. Because of this, I'm considering going back to microlighting as a cheaper and more accessible form of flying, and one that is more "free" in terms of the get up and go factor. I also have enough space out here in Oz to take off and land at my own property in a small microlight, which means I'd get a lot more flying hours in.