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This is an archive of my old web site. It was retired in November 2003 and replaced by my new web site at http://wardley.org/. You should go visit there.
A long time ago in a school classroom far, far away, I came across a blinken box with buttons to press -- a computer. I think the very first computer I ever used was an Acorn Atom, but it was the ZX81 and later, the BBC Micro that really set me off. The start of a love (and sometimes hate) affair with the silicon monkey.
After a few years the world started shifting towards the IBM PC (and "IBM Compatibles" as they were called then) and I had managed to get my hands on one fairly early one. Halcyon days indeed, but it was when I had my nosed rubbed in Unix boxen a few years later that I had really found my home. Now I have a new iMac running OS X and for the first time in ages, I am once again in love with a computer. Well, perhaps "love" is a bit strong, but it really rocks.
After leaving school I went through a few freelance programming jobs, interspersed with a degree in Information Systems Design and other small earners, a period writing all sorts of great Unix bits and pieces, finally culminating in a post-graduate job maintaining SCSI device drivers and supporting things that I don't often like to think about. It was interesting in a geeky low-level way, but it was time to move on.
After that things started getting really interesting. I went to work for Peritas Ltd., now known as KnowledgePool, as a programmer, graphic designer, webmaster and multimedia/online consultant kind of chap. The graphics thing is something that just grew over the years through dabbling in ray tracing, 3D modelling and the like. Multimedia design and development was therefore a natural marriage of my interests in bytes and pixels.
After a couple of years making cool user interfaces, animating cartoon characters, making buttons glow and make nice clicky noises, the World Wide Web suddenly popped into existence and everything changes. I was charged with my colleague and long-time friend, Simon Matthews, to take Peritas' training business online. We did that in spades, in style, and in just under 3 months -- no mean feat given that we had to do everything: purchase hardware, arrange internet connectivity (our internet connection at the time was the modem on my desk), install servers, register domain names, configure sendmail (gak!), design the site both graphically and functionally, code all the back-end, markup all the front-end, build databases, write and edit content, and so on, and so on. I still don't know we did it, but we did.
We launched the site in December 1995 and on the first day back to work in the new year of 1996, we realised we had 100+ static pages, 20-something CGI scripts, 800+ pages generated dynamically offline from a database, and various other bits and pieces, all of which had a copyright message which needed to be changed.
This was the moment that the Template Toolkit was born. Or rather, this was the moment when the predecessor to the predecessor of the Template Toolkit was born. That was when it all began.
A couple of years later I went to work for the web research group at the Canon Research Centre Europe, and I've been there ever since. It was here that the Template Toolkit grew from something that I wrote to save me lots of time, into something that consumes most of my time. But I enjoy it and I still get to play with lots of cool toys.
Like many hackers, the various bits of software I've written have collected dust over the years in mounds of half-finished projects, undocumented utilities and snazzy prototypes with little or no functionality. Or maybe that's just me... But collected here are a few of the useful tools from the pre-Perl days that I did finish, and document.
Most of the interesting code I write now is written in Perl. You can find this in my CPAN directory.
See the MultiGIF Page for more Information.
See the Geodome Page for more information.
See the ABWTwist Page for more information.