I was born in Weardale, County Durham, UK in
1962 to Bryan MALCOLM and Jean RAINE, some two years after they married. I was educated
at Stanhope Barrington primary school until age 11, then Wolsingham Comprehensive school
until age 18. Anyone not interested in the personal stuff should click their browser Back
button now.
Stanhope is a fairly small country village (about 5,000 inhabitants) in County Durham in the north-east of the UK. It was nice growing up there, but fairly boring. My father Bryan was a plumber at the local cement factory, and my mother a housewife. Stanhope is an old village, with a history stretching back to Saxon times. The church dates from around 900AD. This was probably the origin of my interest in local history and genealogy. I enjoyed my time in infant school, and at age eleven began attending Wolsingham Comprehensive school about six miles to the east.
After having made quite a mess of my A-levels, I was fortunate to obtain a place in 1980 on the HND Applied Biology course at Trent Polytechnic in Nottingham. Having finally gotten my act together, I did well enough in the first year examinations to be offered a transfer to the degree course, which I eagerly grasped. I graduated in 1985 with a 2-1 degree, having spent several periods of industrial training in places as diverse as a forensic science laboratory and a whisky distillery.
As part of my degree I had been forced to attend a computer science course, which I was surprised to find that I actually liked. By the time I graduated I was the proud owner of a Sinclair ZX Spectrum (deceased), BBC Model B and Commodore 64 micros and reasonably competent in 6502 assembly language. By now I had decided that I would prefer a career in IT to one in Biology, so in late 1985 managed to obtain a job as a computer operator at New College Durham . Wielding true BOFH power was very difficult to give up, but three years later I decided to become a full-time developer with Durham County Council (a local government authority whose headquarters were only about half a mile down the road.)
Life as an IT devleoper has involved learning (and then forgetting most as they became obsolete) many different languages including IBM VM/370 assembler, REXX, EXEC2, Clipper, Centura (aka SQL-Windows), PL/SQL. Latterly I've worked on the DCC web team, which has involved HTML, Javascript, CSS, Lotus Domino (formula language and LotusScript), XML, XSL. In the near future we will be trialling Websphere as a way of safely making more infomation available over the web so I have had to add Java and J2EE to that list.
Like many large organisations, some of the greatest challenges result from factors totally out of our control. In the run-up to 2000 it was Y2K-proofing every system in existance; in 2004 it is to meet the UK Government Implementing Electronic Government targets by 2005.
Work on the DCC web team is very varied, involving both the corporate Internet and Intranet websites. We use Lotus Domino as our main web platform - it is flexible, secure and integrates well with many of our existing systems - but whether it has a long-term future is debatable. IBM is dragging most of us towards Websphere, and the fact that Domino has almost disappeared completely from the Lotus front page speaks volumes :-/
Away from work (yes, I am sad enough to do IT development in my own time!) I run a homebuilt Linux box ( SuSE distro , 2.4.20 kernel) and build in C++, PHP and MySQL. Not a very high-powered beastie, only 1.2 GHz, but enough to last unless Thief 3 (don't have / like Flash? Try the Gamespy preview instead) stretches it too far!
