Home

About me

So who the devil am I?

  • I live in Birmingham, West Midlands, UK
  • I work in the Intel Open Source Technology Center on the Moblin (Linux for mobile devices) project; my role is to help people write applications for Moblin by making the Moblin SDK most excellent. [Note: this site does not reflect the opinions of my employer, only my personal opinions.]
  • I like programming (Ruby, Java, PHP, Python, JavaScript) and am interested in open source, software development methodologies, design patterns, Linux, 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, Nightingales, Extras, The Office, Father Ted, etc.) and old science fiction/Hammer horror films (The Abominable Dr. Phibes is one of my favourites). 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 (R.I.P.), 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 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).

Bits of me elsewhere

My LinkedIn profile.

My Flickr photos.

My Twitter profile.

My Last.fm profile.

My Facebook profile.

My ODesk profile (outlines my professional skills).

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

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). Here are the full details on the Rails Contributors site.

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.