This is me, I work on the Web.

If you’ve lived in Australia in the last 5 years, there’s a reasonably good chance my code has touched your life in some subtle way, but you’d never notice it.  The stuff I do for a living sits quietly in the background and helps to ensure things continue to tick over and make the world just that little bit better.

I started down the path of becoming an IT Geek by simple curiosity. In May/June of 1993 I saw this magazine, with the headline “Intel’s Rocket in a Socket: Pentium 60″ and “We review the 486 DX2/66″, and convinced mum to let me buy it.

My first computer (An Acer 486 DX4/100) I managed to ‘break’ within 20 minutes of having it all plugged in and running, much to the horror of my family. Nevertheless, I quickly learned how to reinstall DOS and Windows.

Access to the ‘net a few years later lead to my first involvement in helping to create the web. A joint project with a friend from School (Hi Phil!), complete with Liberal use of Frames, Animated ‘Under Construction’ images, and even a little Javascript to do mouse-roll-overs for the graphic menu links. It took Macromedia coming out with Dreamweaver Ultradev for me to get into creating data-driven sites, and learning ASP. 

For the past five years I’ve been working for a large company here in Australia and I’ve had some pretty unique opportunities to be part of some fast-paced and exciting things. Things you probably wouldn’t find in too many other companies around the world.

In my own time, I help to run a small collection of community sites and projects under the ‘plebian.net’ banner/domain.

So, what’s your story? Do you work on the web? 

See more people who also work on the web.   (No, I don’t have a flickr account)

Okay, I’ve settled on the changes and new features for Smitter for Release 3.

I need to clean up the code base, and change how certain things work. So, it’ll be a few more days - possibly Saturday/Sunday before Release 3 is ready.

New Features:

• Automatically convert long URLs you send, into short URLs with urlTea (Intercepts pasted URLs)
• Minimise to Notification Area (”Task Tray”) Icon.
• Balloon Alert when your Twitter ID is mentioned in a tweet, or when you recieve a Direct Message (Configurable in Settings)
• Replies Tab
• Direct Messages Tab
• Automatic Check for new Direct Messages (Default: Every 10 minutes)
• Links Tab - Gathers all URLs that appear in new Tweets.

Changes:

• First Start shows the full settings page,  enabling you to set the proxy at the same time.
• Option to use proxy server from Internet Explorer
  (NB: If your proxy requires a username/password - you may still need to specify it)
• Longer Image Cache period (4hrs)
• Refresh Times for Friends List
• Limit of 50 Tweets kept
• Fix multiple “Loading…” messages, and displaying of errors (errors go to an Logging tab)
• More obvious seperation between Tweets
• (Updated) Now responds to Mouse-Wheel scrolling

Known Issues which won’t/can’t be fixed yet:

• Dynamic resizing of tweets
  (I need to figure out a fix for this - resizing + Flow Layout Panel = ugliness)
• Proxy detection from Firefox
  (Not sure if I can do this correctly - esp. difficult if using Auto Detection and/or a proxy.pac config file.)

Moving to a WPF Front end and .NET 3.0 are off the cards for the moment.

The good news is that I’m feeling fairly comfortable with C# now - I’m missing not having certain things that VB just does for you automatically.  The whole “sprinkle in some curly-braces and semi-colons” thing is getting to be natural though.