About Me
Personal
I live in Claregalway, Co. Galway (Ireland) with my wife, Mary, and 3 clildren: Mark (25), Emma (22), and Sophie (15). We have a cat, even though I'm more of a dog person.
I'm a technophile. A PC and Linux head - don't really like Mac's but they're tolerable since OS X (when they started using a Linux kernel). I use iTunes, but copy the songs to an Android device. I'm a night owl and drink more coffee than is probably good for me - could I possibly be a more stereotypical developer? My hobby is playing jazz trombone with a local big band. I prefer movies to tv, like intelligent sci-fi and fantasy but I have not fully embraced nerd-dom because I just don't get things like comic books and animé. I have no time for politics and politicians but that doesn't stop me having a good moan about how they're ruining the country every now and then.
Work
Since 2002, I have worked for the National University of Ireland, Galway in their Information Solutions and Services department, where I'm:- Administrator of a load-balanced 4 node cluster of RedHat Linux servers.
- DB Admin for a MySQL cluster
- Web Developer - Primarily responsible for the University's web site functionality. I code the client-side stuff like the high-contrast switching, text zoom and link search as well as the server-side, database driven stuff such as the courses' short URL engine and internal content management system.
By night I'm a trombone player.
Education
I hold a first class honours M.Sc. in Software and Information Systems, am a Member of the Institution of Analysts & Programmers (MIAP), and am a certified ethical hacker (CEH). My professional interests include IT security, secure programming and Web development.
