| Date of Birth: | 18 May 1977 |
| Address: | 6 Hilgay Close, Winstanley, Wigan, Lancs. WN3 6EX |
| Telephone: | 01942 708075 |
| Email: | gavin@kinsey.u-net.com |
| WWW: | http://www.kinsey.u-net.com/ |
B.Eng. Software Engineering degree | |
UMIST University | 1999-1996 |
Received a 2.2 degree.
Some of the courses that were a part of this degree were,
Year three: Machine Learning, Neural Networks, Formal Methods, Computer Vision and Image Understanding, Real time systems. An individual project to create an real-time object tracking system using matrices.
Year two: C++ programming, Database Systems, Logic and Specification. A group project that involved the design and implementation of a mini-web browser and network protocol.
Year one: C Programming, Maths, Electronic Circuits.
Winstanley College 1995-1993
3 A-Levels: Computing - B, Physics - B, Pure and Applied Maths - C.
Hawkley Hall High School 1993-1988
10 GCSE's: Maths A, Science AA, Business Studies B, English C, English Lit. C, History C, Geography C,
French C, Music D.
Full knowledge of BASIC, Pascal, C, C++ and Java. All my programs tend to be object orientated as I find that style to be very useful, so I prefer to use C++ whenever possible to take advantage of it's features in this area, Java is useful but the speed issues mean it is not an ideal choice in most cases.
Can use HTML and javascript effectively to create web sites, and have created my own site. Unfortunately due to time constraints it is not updated very often, but the experience I gained means that I can quickly create new pages for it or other sites, when time permits.
Experience of a variety of operating systems including AmigaOS, Linux, MSDOS, Windows 3.11, 95/98 and NT. I started programming under AmigaOS, but have recently started to program under Linux. I have done some programming under Win32 also mainly using visual compilers to speed development.
As I am used to writing programs that may have to run on several different systems I usually create very portable code, with system specific functions all placed together and normally accessed through wrapper functions so it the program will compile on the different systems without changes.
Most recently I have been working on a program called "Storm of the Eye", it is a play by email client- server game with a graphical client. The AmigaOS version of the client had some memory leaks that the author was unable to track done and so he sent me a copy of the source code. I found the leaks and am in the process of rewriting the memory allocation routines to use pools to speed up the program. I am also writing a replacement of the blitter routines which currently use a third party library, to use standard AmigaOS calls instead. This should make the game run better on some of the more unusual graphics cards.
I like to read a lot, mainly science fiction books and some fantasy and humorous ones. I also spend a significant amount of time reading technical books on computers.
I have an internet connection at home and spend time reading news-groups and several mailing lists. The web is a useful resource but I do not use it very often as the phone calls are expensive.
I enjoy playing computer games, especially strategy or management games. I have spent many hours building large SimCities. My main activity, however, is programming. At the moment I am playing around with the recently released Quake source and helping to create a port for PPC-Amigas.
Email me if you want to know more.
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