I'm a multimedia developer based in London for the last 14 years. Happy in PHP, Macromedia Director, QuickTime & RealBasic. I've probably had experience of just about everything you're likely to encounter in multimedia production, from optics calibration to SSH configuration, via interactive video and VR, audio engineering and lighting design, multilingual databases and W3C compliance! I've shipped over a million CD-ROMs across a couple of hundred projects. I have a BSc in Computer Science and Digital Electronics, and a Masters in interactive computer system design. I've done my share of assembler (x86, 68k, DSP) and C/C++, but they're mostly things I like to avoid nowadays!
My OS of choice is MacOS X; It's just so nice seeing stuff done right. I often have to endure delivering projects on Windows, and like everyone else, have to deal with technological antiques like IE6. I also run OpenBSD and Linux servers which don't ever seem to die.
PHP is what I'm up to at the moment - I'm the chief developer on an enterprise-level mailing list management system at
http://www.smartmessages.net/ If you wish to contact me outside EE, please use the contact form on that site - I'm always interested in other development work. As far as EE goes, I'm something of a stickler for doing things right - if you're going to do HTML, it should validate, PHP code should adhere to good programming practices just like any other language, especially as advice on here is mainly for those that are learning PHP, so I'm not out to impose my bad habits!
If you feel I've helped you above and beyond what's required, donations are always welcome (via my sourceforge ID:
http://sourceforge.net/users/coolbru/), and help to keep me on here, and other projects that I help out on (such as PHPMailer).
A few tips that (if read!) would probably halve the number of questions on the PHP TA:
Always read the PHP docs, they are a thing of beauty! Participate by reporting errors, suggesting (and writing) improvements and adding user notes:
http://www.php.net/manual/en/Just don't bother ever using mail() - it's more trouble than it's worth. Use PHPMailer instead:
http://phpmailer.sourceforge.net/HTML arrays - life was much more difficult before I discovered these!
http://www.php.net/manual/en/faq.html.phpSmarty is fabulous:
http://smarty.php.net/PEAR is a Very Good Thing - use its packages, abuse them, report bugs so they can get better.
http://pear.php.net/Happy coding!
