Contact 

You can email me about the stuff on here via martin at spamcop dot net or mhs at users dot sourceforge dot net. 

Please Note: all my email addresses are protected by multiple layers of spam filtering. If I don't reply then something may have eaten your message.

Incidentally, I hope all spammers go to their own private and extremely terrible hell. Today would be good.

About Me

I don't normally like writing about myself but it seems to be expected so here are a few brief words.

I've been programming since the age of about twelve. The first programmable device I owned was a Sinclair Enterprise calculator with all of 7 memory locations and 79 program steps.  I still have it and it still works, though it doesn't get used very much now. From there I went on to the 8-bit computers of the 1980s. Learning to program with limited resources is a valuable experience that people nowadays seem to miss out on.

I've done a lot of projects on Unix, mostly Solaris and Linux, which has helped to give me a feeling of bafflement at the things that Windows users are expected to put up with.

Many of the projects I've worked on have been in telecoms. They range from setting up ISPs to network modelling high throughput platforms for mobile messaging.

I like to think that I've been an early adopter of most of the good technologies. I started with web development very early on with Mosaic and the early versions of httpd. I arrived at Java quite early too, when everyone thought it only meant applets and using it for server projects was considered a risk. These days I use Java almost exclusively.