Open Source
I am interested in Free Software and Open Source. I am, or have been, involved in several Open Source projects.
The ACCU
I am an active member of the ACCU (Association of C and C++ Users). I have done several book reviews for them and try to attend their Spring conference each year.
CORBA
I have been interested in CORBA right from the beginning (i.e. when the standard was so embryonic, CORBA would not even interoperate with itself!). Despite the complexity of the standard, I still think CORBA has alot to offer. I have used several ORBs, some open source, some commercial. My favourite used to be MICO but unfortunately the support for multithreading is still not finished so TAO (the ACE ORB) is now the winner. I have also just started to look at JacORB by Gerald Brose. The best commercial ORB (IMO) still seems to be Orbix from IONA. For those interested in CORBA I recommend heading over to the web site of Ciaran McHale, an IONA consultant whom I have worked with before. He has a free book there which I think provides a great practical introduction to programming with CORBA.The TeX users group
I am a keen user of TeX, via the LaTeX variant created by Leslie Lamport. I have been a member of the UK branch of the Tex Users Group for several years. I tend to produce most of my documentation using LaTeX. This allows me to produce PDF and postscript files (via DVI conversion programs) and RTF files (via latex2rtf). The RTF format is an open format but due to its close integration with Microsoft Word for Windows it is useful for people that require documents to be in a Microsoft format. I used to use latex2html to create web pages from my LaTex documents, but have now found that HeVeA does a better job and is much faster.Tools
Since September 2006 I started working more extensively in a Microsoft Windoze environment (not my choice), so I provide links to tools that ease the pain a little. I also have some other tools, most of which come from a UNIX environment.Heroes of software
I was tempted to put this on the 'interests' section but then I thought I would leave the geeky stuff out of those pages so it ended up here. There are so many potential heroes for a computer geek to look up to, but my favourite is Alan Turing. He is regarded by many as the father of computer science. He is particularly admired by many of us in the UK for his involvement in the outstanding effort in decrypting German messages during the Second World War at the code cracking centre in Bletchley Park.Links
Here are links to some interesting software (all open source) ...
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