I'm a 33 year old software engineer, currently living in Reading. I'm self-employed at the moment, but over the last year I've mainly been working on a real-time landscape rendering program. My interests outside of computing are cycling, listening to music and reading.

Here's a picture of me taken by an ex-flatmate for his Art and Design degree. The theme of his degree was 'light', so he wanted my face to be illuminated by a television. In the background is an arcade cabinet which belonged to another flat-mate.

Nerd Kit

One of the things I was looking forward to when I bought my house was having the extra space to buy lots more nerd kit. I currently have eleven computers scattered around the house, plus the obligatory cabling, switches and hubs.

Here a picture of lexx, my main computer. It's an Athlon XP3200 which dual boots FreeBSD and WindowsXP.

This is my firewall, dookie, built out of an old K6 motherboard plus a large hard drive for file storage/mp3s. It does NAT so all my machines can use the Internet; it also runs a mail server, web cache and local name server.

After having learned C and UNIX on Sun workstations at University, I felt obliged to buy one for home. ra is a 333MHz Ultra 5 running Solaris 9. I mainly use it to learn about Solaris administration and write Java.

siamese is a dual 400MHz Pentium II which I use for testing purposes. At various times I've had FreeBSD Stable, FreeBSD Current, Linux and Windows 2000 installed on it.

I have an Apple computer (core) in my lounge so I can access the Internet when I'm cooking or just plain can't be bothered to go upstairs. It's a 450MHz G4 PowerMac running MacOS X (based on BSD unix with a gorgeous user interface on top), plugged into a luvverly 18" TFT monitor.

xev is the first slave node in my cluster [1]. It's a 1GHz Athlon running FreeBSD, using the PVM daemon for node-to-node connectivity.

My iPAQ doesn't have a name since it isn't on my network (yet).

I have a laptop vaio for whenever I'm away from home or away from my desk. Notice the wireless network card; I can web browse from anywhere in my house or garden :-)

I have a few other machines - a Pentium Pro, an Amiga 4000 and a Bull Estrella - which have been retired from active service (although I do occasionally boot up the Amiga for nostalgia's sake).

[1] Building a cluster is a nerd dream - you network together N computers, then write software to distribute a task between the machines. When a node finishes one block of work, it sends the results back to the master node and starts on the next. For an example of such software, see 'frump' on my projects page.