<- Me in a
photo booth having had a couple of pints: this, by the way, is a great tip
for not looking like an alien in photo booth pictures. Get bladdered beforehand.Well, let's get the picture out of the way early on and clear the vomit up before we get any further...
<- Me in a
photo booth having had a couple of pints: this, by the way, is a great tip
for not looking like an alien in photo booth pictures. Get bladdered beforehand.
Well, I'm glad that's over with. Ok, so I don't have a beard anymore (such that it was anyway), but apart from that it's a fairly accurate picture. You don't notice the antennae in real life, anyway.
I (as in Hugo Fiennes, if you hadn't worked it out yet) was born in Butleigh, Somerset dangerously close to April fool's day, 1971. When people meet me they usually imagine me to be a lot taller than I am, which I find strange (do I sound tall? I'm a mere slip of a boy at 5'7"). I'm currently having a whale of a time with empeg, a company I co-founded which makes the coolest in-car Linux MPEG jukeboxes. Ok, the only in-car Linux MPEG jukeboxes. Did I mention they play music?
I've done lots of other stuff - bits for Symbian that are going into millions of mobile phones, lasertag microcontroller code, terminal emulators... but this is far by the most fun. And it plays music.
Irrelevant heading
My main interests are computers, cars, music and films - as you can see below, I've been at this computer thing for well over half my life so far. As for cars, you've probably guessed I've got an MX-5 Turbo. The japanese theme continues with my Honda CRX VTEC, which despite being a '93 car, is actually the old 90-92 design (ie, the nice one). Both a vewy vewy nice, and yes, I do realise I'm a lucky bastard.
Oooo, it's an old Civic S!
If you've looked at this page before, you'd have seen that I used to
have a 1983 Honda Civic S, which I still think is the best looking small
hatchback of the early 80's, until the '86 Honda CRX came along and looked
even better, although more cramped in the back. It got sold to someone in
the midlands (at 134k miles!)... and I did see it about last year, so it's
still going. Probably on the same engine too.
Music stuff
As for music, I like recent stuff (Stereophonics, Texas, Catatonia, Morcheeba, Blur, Carter USM, Prodigy, Shamen, Ash, Pulp, Bis, Bluetones, Oasis, PWEI, Eels, James, Space, Mansun...) and older 80's/90's stuff (Depeche Mode, KLF, The Police...). I'm not organised enough to remember what's in my CD collection without actually being near it, but I do know I've got something like 30 separate Shamen titles, which means I'm either an addict or deeply sad, depending on how much of my DNA they used when they cloned you. I really can't live without music, which makes my current job rather fun as I get to listen to a lot of music in the name of testing. Loud.
I tend to go to the Glastonbury festival most years, which is a wonderous place - and only partially because of the music. So much goes on there, and the atmosphere is so great that it's just plain addictive.
Computer stuff (beep, boop)
Some of my previous projects include:
Unix - Linux kernel hacking for the empeg, some user-level bits, some perl, some C, either to support my own system or for particular applications (barcode scanner interfaces, multiplexers...)
Device drivers for SCSI chips, IDE drives, serial cards... and so on.
Lots of Acorn RISC OS stuff - The original acorn soundtracker player, some demos, a multiuser BBS system (ARCbbs), terminal programs (ARCterm 3, 6, and 7), a multisession telnet/rlogin client (ANTterm, in the ANT internet suite), Block Drivers, various bits and pieces - MagFS (MagOpt disk FS), Acorn's SID system, a multiuser database for the 1994 Glastonbury Festival... almost anything!
Some Mac stuff, but all of it bespoke applications, so you wouldn't have seen any of it!
Some microcontroller programming - 68hc705, 68hc11, 80c31 used with real time systems.
... generally, I prefer programming 'near' the hardware - device drivers and that sort of thing - than that GUI stuff - but it's all good fun.
Films
GO AND SEE 'THE FIFTH ELEMENT' NOW! NOW! NOW! IT'S WONDERFUL! I'VE SEEN IT 3 TIMES IN ONE WEEK! (gibber, gibber)
Ultimate destination
Probably a nice sunny bit of France with wonderful views, lots of cars, a T3 line and someone special.