Computing.

I seem to have spent most of my working life doing just one thing, programming Gloss... However, occassionally I get the chance to branch into other areas.

Goo Applet
This is a computerised version of a little toy at work, a container full of red goo, following similar principles to a sand hourglass. The logic behind the goo movement is quite simple, the entire applet area is stored internally as an array, and every cycle any 'goo' array elements, are tried to be moved into a space immediately below them. If no space is available, they are moved into the space below them to the left or right, then to the left or right plus two, up to ten spaces to the left or right of them.

Tech Tools
Some of my favourite computing tools

Perl Deadlocks
This tells you how to detect deadlocks in perl and loop around to re-execute SQL if one has just happened. Of course this assumes your SQL is transactionally sound, so if a deadlock occurs, it rollbacks to a safe position...

Map Overlayer
For my MSc Project at Aston University back in 1991, I wrote a Macintosh application to plot National Grid References on a map. This was written in Pascal, using a class library 'QuickApp' written by the supervisor, Dr Coxhead. The project got me really into wanting a job programming the Macintosh - this was still at the time when Windows hadn't taken over the world yet and people still saw the Macintosh as a great hope. Alas the macintosh went down the tube, and I ended up at Wilco writing, C and SQL in UNIX.

Available online are:

• Overview document
• User Manual (MS Word created HTML)
• My Yahoo Briefcase contains the Macintosh Archive file and manual in Windows Word 6/95+ and Macintosh Word 4 formats
• Location of application posting on the UK Mirror site (look for map-overlayer files)

Sinclair ZX Spectrum Hacking
My first real taste of computing was the Sinclair ZX Spectrum. It was my 1983 Christmas present, though I'd already learnt BASIC and Z80 assembly language before getting it. I spent most of the time cracking games, finding Infinite Lives cheats.

Landmark Trading System
At Nicholas Applegate in San Diego I worked on the Landmark Trading System. This page gives an overview of the system.

Visual Basic Overview
A brief look at the Visual Basic language used for the 3 front end applications at Nicholas Applegate

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