My name is Dave Malcolm, and I work as an IT developer for
Durham County Council
in the north-east of England. Working for DCC has meant working with a large variety of hardware platforms and development
languages, from building a National Non-Domestic Rating (business rate replacement) system in IBM S/370 assembler to
developing job costing, stock control and ordering systems with
Gupta Technologies' Team Developer
on an Oracle 8 backend running on RS/6000 servers.
Gupta is an object-oriented development platform for Windows. It has never managed to grab the market share of giants such as Delphi, VB and Visual C++, but is a great product and incorporates many OO features such as multiple inheritance that its competitors either lack entirely or at best only poorly implement. Still, if technical excellence was all that was required, we would be knee-deep in Betamax VCRs, not VHS. All that it takes is better marketing.
More recently I have moved into the area of web design and programming. Having being a Lotus Notes site for several years, it was a natural decision to use Lotus Domino for our new website. Check out the results and tell me what you think.
Genealogy: Researching BENSON, BRYAN, MALCOLM, MORDUE, MORTON, O'DELL or RAINE surnames? We may have a common ancestor.
Had A Bad Day: Try some of these links. They make me laugh, anyway.
Demon Internet are one of the few subscription-based dialup ISPs remaining in the UK with around 100,000 private subscribers. How long they will survive in the face of their subscription-free competititors such as FreeServe, Barclays and Screaming.Net remains to be seen. Even the mighty AOL have been forced to launch a no-fee version to compete with FreeServe.
The "demon" bit is supposed to suggest "fast" rather than "damned", but it can cause problems. Once I received an e-mail from someone who took one look at my domain name then wrote to tell me I would roast in Hell for eternity... Nice.
There have also been problems in the past for clergy who have opened internet accounts with them :-) The fact that most of their phone numbers end in 666 probably doesn't help matters either.
It can be annoying not to be able to view the whole source for an HTML page, so if you would like
a peek at the stylesheet (global.css) and JavaScript
(footer.js and pratchett.js) files used here, please
feel free. All comments (good, bad, indifferent) are welcome.
