This is my professional blog detailing my start-up adventures setting up a web empire.
A few years ago I was inspired to start setting up web sites. I have had my ups and downs, but as they say, everything that does not destroy us make us stronger.
The original plan was to set-up content sites with advertising but I've developed a taste for news and have developed a number of useful technologies over the years which I am now commercialising.
I also enjoy photography, and tend to experiment with different settings
and take a number of shots of each composition. Occasionally I get
lucky. I use a few random photos as the background to this page. Everytime you reload your should get another pretty picture.
Like everything I do, this web site is powered by my own technology...
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Also on Facebook!
and  for professional networking.
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To contact me for commerical purposes please use the contact form on my company's web site:
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I got fed with Internet Explorer the other day. It take forever to fire up and wastes toads of resources. In particular I schedule web pages to be opened many times a day to trigger scripts to run on my web servers for various maintenance functions. The quick and easy way to do this, without any specialised software is to schedule Internet Explorer with a URL in the command line using Scheduled Tasks. It works, but Internet Explorer stops me working for a minute or so while it fires up and loads the web page, and then when it's finished it sits there using resources. The only way to avoid having thousands of redundant Internet Explorer processes laying around is to have the scheduling terminate them an hour or so later. However this is far from perfect as this leaves unreleased resources locked forever, and I suspect memory leaks like a holed ocean liner, until eventually the PC runs out of virtual memory, resources, or whatever and basically sinks. A reboot was becoming advisable once a day, and operation was getting slower and slower between reboots. So I wrote my own browser, WebExpress. It's a 'renderless' browser, that is to say it shamelessly makes no attempt to render HTML or CSS. Why? Because that's not important for running scripts on the server. Internet Explorer and Firefox, Safari, Chrome, Opera, and all the others offer an amazingly rich array of presentation capabilities and frameworks for plug ins and hosting third party extensions. These are great for user experience but totally irrelevant for what I needed. My browser is optimised for speed, and small footprint. It may not render, but it is 150x faster than Internet Explorer, uses a 10th of the resources, IO, and processor, and uses no processor time while idle. It also has the ability to terminate itself after downloading a web page, releasing all resources and memory. It might not be everyone's cup of tea, but I'm ecstatic with it, it takes 0.1 seconds to open a web page, download, disconnect, and then it closes itself 5 seconds later, releasing all resources and memory. And no reboots required!
I'm now working on a social media monitoring site for a client. It's an exciting project and I'm pleased to be a part of it. I can't say to much about the specifics for obvious client confidentiality reasons, but I'm really excited about the user interface. I've designed an awesome panel system, and integrated it with the latest Flash and HTML 5 graphing technology and it looks awesome. From the ground up I've built it around delayed loading technology so all the data driven panels download after initial load and update in real time as user selections change. I wish I could say more, but I can't! ;)Once the service is launched I'm sure I'll plug it here.
Our Facebook game is code complete. Well first stage anyway. It's now over to my business partners to play test it, set-up the items, values, payouts, levels, etc.. and get the graphics done. I'm sure I'll have to do some more coding to implement post testing changes and accommodate the final graphics design, and I'm going to have to add a demo and maintenance functions but that's once everything is finalised. In the meantime I'm working on another project...
Our first facebook game is almost code complete! It's been a seriously fast development effort. Just a few more things to tidy up and probably some work integrating background images to give it that consumer facing polish...
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My Latest Saved News
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It's also great for checking out dubious web sites as it's completely immune to client side scripting, java, active x, plug-ins, tool bars, buffer overruns, etc. so you can see sneak a peak at a site with no risk whatsoever. It also makes the source available without having to visiting the site with a conventional browser. 
