If you wish to contact me see the Contact page.

I've been programming on and off since the days of punched cards :-). My first experience of programming was with a machine like this:

(not me in the photo!)

That's just the machine for punching the cards. The computer itself occupied a large room about the size of the ground floor of a house, and was probably less powerful than the first ever home PCs. It didn't have enough memory to store all the programs so you had to hand in your program to the receptionists each time you wanted it to be run and then get the results of your run later in the day. You could however communicate with the program while it was running using a teletype (a continuous roll of paper that scrolled down as you typed with your input, and the computer's responses).

Later trained as a mathematician and wrote programs to explore some of the patterns I was interested such as this one:

I'd love to share this program, but it isn't suitable for public release in its present form as it was written for Windows 3.1 and hasn't yet been updated. It would run okay as a 16 bit program but I need to make some changes before it could be released, and the easiest way ahead is to update it to 32 bit first, which is a bit of an undertaking. (See Porting 16-Bit Windows-Based Applications to Win32)

I also wrote some programs to play some board games and puzzles that I invented, and to draw and print out the pieces for the games. I still have hopes to publish these in print however rather than software (or with the software as a companion to the published game) - and the software again is all for Windows 3.1 and not updated, so for both reasons, none of my board games programs are yet in a state suitable for a public release as software.

I wrote other programs too, earlier on - the most complex is a cellular automaton simulator for some of my mathematics research, optimised to run especially quickly so that you can quickly fast forward through the generations to see what happens. These programs are for Linux (the X-Windows system) and haven't been updated or even tested for many years now, and aren't available for download.

However, maybe you are interested to hear how I developed the programs that you can download here.

Fractal Tune Smithy developed out of an idea for a fractal tune I had that would continue endlessly. The first version was very basic and just played a single melodic line of notes all the same length.

However fairly early on I began to explore some of the tunings in the huge Scala scales archive in Fractal Tune Smithy. I was delighted when Manual Op de Coul gave me permission to use those scales in FTS, and then found out that FTS was doing things that few other programs could do, so it was quite in demand with some microtonal composers. I also got more and more interested in microtonal music so it developed like that.

Virtual Flower developed out of an idea I had of a way to make trees in the virtual reality modelling language VRML. The fractal methods let one make trees in files of only a few kilobytes instead of the megabytes they would normally be with that level of detail.

Lissajous 3D developed from Barbara Hero's work with Lissajous patterns corresponding to musical chords. You often have chords of three or more notes in music so it was natural to extend the idea to three or more frequencies played simultaneously, but I hadn't noticed the connection that made with 3D shapes until the composer Charles Lucy pointed it out, which then lead to the idea of Lissajous 3D. Just to make it clear - the idea of a 3D Lissajous pattern isn't a new idea actually, as later on I found out that Lissajous knots figure in the mathematical discipline of knot theory, but it was new to me when I wrote the program.

Activity Timer I developed originally to keep track of the time I spent on projects myself - as with many software developers I was very prone to overwork, often late at night when everyone else is asleep - and have a great tendency to forget how long I was on the computer, so needed a software reminder to take short eye breaks from time to time, and to stop work for a longer break. Hopefully it is helpful for others in the same situation, and also for those who need or want to find the total times they spend on their various computer related activities.

Text Echo I developed to explore certain programming possibilities to see how they could be done, vis. echoing and directly editing text fields in other programs - and then it was a natural to develop it further to do certain text editing tasks I needed to do such as a flexible way to do a search and replace of multiple search terms simultaneously in all the files in a folder, and to do page redirects for all the web pages in a web site in one go. So - though there are many programs that work with text, this one does have its special points. I expect TFE to be useful for occasional fairly techy users who may have similar requirements to myself.

The text font transforming and text enlarging properties of TFE can be fun for less techy users, and it can also be used to directly read or edit text in tiny scrollable regions of web pages.

Apart from that, the main point of interest is perhaps the wild words search. Perhaps the search and replace of all the files in a folder can be useful, particularly the capability to search and replace several words or phrases simultaneously, or even to use a list of as many replacements as you like from a file, and carry them all out simultaneously on all the files in a folder and (optionally) all its sub-folders.

TFE can also be used as a text magnifier for partially sighted users, which I may develop at some point. But it isn't that great for that - as it can't echo Word documents, then there are pdfs, file names in Explorer, tables, etc etc. and unfortunately because of the approach I used, they would all need to be done as many special cases, and some of them would take a fair amount of work to code (e.g. Word documents). I'm not sure if it is sufficiently unique to be worth developing in this area given the wide range of text magnifying programs already available for partially sighted users.

Generally - I'm not sure where TFE is going and what will be developed out of it later on. So if you get that impression from it then you are quite right. It is included here along with the other programs because, incomplete as it is, it may yet be of value to you, if one of the things it does happens to be just what you are looking for.

Site Designed with advice from Sojo Media (Thanks!)

The tool tips use the overlib library - see the Overlib home page.

Bookmark this page: - and many more - What are these?

All downloads on this web site are free of spyware etc