Software engineer living and working in various places around the south and west of Ireland. Playing with computers since about 1985, studying computer science since 1990, working with computers on a full time basis since 1995. I recently started working for myself as dilbert land was grinding away at my soul. While in dilbert land I worked for Intel, Ericsson and Tellabs, a few smaller companies and I've had some non-computer related jobs too. I like to see computers being used to makes the world a better place and there is a bit of that going around but often they just make people grumpy, impatient and selfserving. There is a lot of that going around too.

I played a lot of guitar as a teenager, wrote music, played in a band. I play another few intruments as well but none as well as guitar. I don't get the kick I used to get out of it. Listening to music is still very important to me and I go out of my way to get a varied diet of music. I welcome suggestions on good CDs to buy. Coarse fishing, sea fishing, obsessive amounts of reading, swimming, dance music and trying to see as much of the world as possible are other pursuits which do, or have in the past kept me mostly sane. I'm doing badly on the see the whole world goal though, it's a tough one to get the balance right between work and travel. So far work has been winning out but I intend to travel at bit more in the near future.

My Perl skills are fairly minimal. I've read the Camel book twice, the Owl book twice, the Mouse book once. I loved the first two even if they did take two attempts but I didn't much care for the Mouse book. I have written a few s‎crip‎ts here and there but I haven't immersed myself in Perl development with any largish projects so hence I haven't mastered it yet. My current main employment involves PHP, XML, XSLT, MySQL so I'll report back to the monastery after a few months of working with PHP day in, day out and start a discussion. One thing about Perl of which I am especially fond is the regular expression flavour. Regular expressions are raw power at your fingertips. I'm fairly enamoured by Perl but I believe in diversity in all things, from bio-diversity to techno-diversity so I am going to give PHP the attention that I think it deserves. Training wheels without the bike sounds like a very efficient design as long as all you are looking for is something that rolls.

Here is a really nice T-shirt with Perl code in the shape of a dolphin, doing RSA encryption/decryption, available from thinkgeek.

#!/usr/bin/perl -s
                                                    @x=qw/e n d/;if(
                             $kg){$e=13;$_="setrand(@{[int((rand)*90)]
+})
;K=vector(2,g,nextprime(random(10^$s)));e=$e;n=K[1]*
                             K[2];d=e^-1%((K[1]-1)*(K[2]-1));";s/\s//s
+g;for(
                              `echo "$_ e\nn\nd\n"|gp -q`){print$x[$j+
++]
                            ,"=",`echo "10i16o$_ p"|dc`}exit}$t=
                           unpack'H*',join'',<>;$l=length$n;$y
                        =$e?$l-2:$l;$i="16dio";while  (){$M=
                    ($e&&1+int(rand 8)).(substr     $t,$p
                 ,$y or last);$i.="\U$M $k        $n\E|
              pc";$p+=$y}for(reverse
         `echo "$i"|dc`){chop
 ;$d&&s/^(.)//||($_=
   sprintf"%0${l}s"
    ,$_); $f
    .=$_}#
    print
    pack
   'H*'
 ,$f
#  RSA Encryption, Decryption and Key Generation with Perl/dc/gp.
#  Copyright (c) 1998-2000, Vipul Ved Prakash.
#  http://munitions.vipul.net/documents/rsafin.html
#  $Id: fin,v 0.10 1999/01/25 23:24:37 root Exp root $
#  Syntax:
#  To generate 1024-bit key: fin -kg -s=155
#  To generate 2048-bit key: fin -kg -s=309 (Takes a while.)
#  To encrypt/decrypt: fin -k=key -n=rsa_modulus [-e/-d] files.
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