Until 2004, I was an editor and writer on UK computer magazines, latterly PC Plus. My main areas of interest were, and still are, programming and technical.
This site contains a selection of software and articles written during my PC Plus years, along with a few things I have done since.
See the list of (mostly) free software
See the article index
Some is rather dated but a lot is still relevant.
Then and now
Programming got me hooked on computers in the mid-eighties and quickly led to a career change from railway engineering to computer magazines, with a happy few months in between spent learning C on a government-sponsored course.
That early fascination with coding never left me and I often found excuses to work it into my job during 16 years in publishing, for example writing software to put on cover-mounted disks.
My move into publishing rather than mainstream IT had been an accident. The opportunity came at a moment when I needed a job and I knew it had to be in computing. I had a good time on magazines but often wondered what would have happened if the door to Database Publications (which later became Europress) hadn't opened when it did.
When the last major "what next?" moment presented itself, at the age of 49 I decided to find out and try for a position as a programmer. Luck was with me and less than a fortnight after the decision was made, I took up residence in the production programmer's seat of fire at a busy little digital printing company in the west of England.
I mainly write and maintain software that produces highly customised data-driven print runs. Most are written in VB.Net and Printsoft's PReS document composition language. We have plenty of legacy code in VB6 and a sprawling collection of in-house bits and bobs written in other languages, including a modest but effective page description language I invented to speed up print job set-up.
Immediately before this, I set up a couple of small mail-order business web sites with bespoke e-commerce systems written in PHP and MySQL (and of course XHTML with CSS).
I have used VBA (MS Office automation) extensively and have intermittent but good experience of C/C++.
Much further back, I did a lot of coding in Z80 assembler and have dipped into many other languages to varying extents. A corner of me is still frustrated that Forth never hit the mainstream but .Net has stacks and whole lot more and is the most productive programming system I have seen.