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Friends and family

• Click here to view my page on Facebook.
• Roger Burgess is my best friend and was one of my Stage 1 computer science students from 1998. Now he works in Japan for a joint venture of Trimble and Nikon.
• Graham Dockrill was another one of my Stage 1 computer science students in 1998. Now he runs a successful Web design company called Hairy Lemon.
• Diane Maclagan was my classmate during the years of 1992-1994 while I was at university studying mathematics. She was always getting better grades than me, which was very damaging to my ego, and to top it all off she is now at Rutgers University. The best that I can do to try to beat her brilliance is for me to try to make my website a lot cooler than hers. I hope that I have succeeded!
• Chris Wright is an old school mate from the years 1986-1991 at Christchurch Boys' High School. He is now a grandmaster chess player, one of only three in New Zealand! He works as a professional chess tutor tutoring young players for the junior world championships. If you are another graduate of the class of 1991 then I would like to get in touch with you.
• Joe Tonner is my sister's partner and he has a website advertising his business in employment conditions negotiation.
• Frank Pearson (now deceased) was my uncle (father's older brother) in San Francisco.
• Nicky Pearson is a cousin (father's older brother's daughter) in Edmonton, Canada.
• Alistair Campbell is a cousin (mother's sister's son) from England.
• Tibbles is my cat who has her own website.

Favourite people

• Bjarne Stroustrup. Creator of the C++ programming language. My feeling about C++ is that if it hadn't been invented yet and I was as intelligent as Bjarne Stroustrup, then I would have invented it! Esoteric Information Warning: I believe that Stroustrup got his clever and useful idea of C++ classes and privacy from the Simula language.
• Richard Stallman. Founder of the GNU Project and principal author of (among other things) the GNU Emacs text editor and the GCC compiler. He's also quite a character as I found out when I went to one of his lectures. Esoteric Information Warning: I believe that Stallman wrote Emacs by copying the existing Lisp systems at MIT where he worked, and wrote GCC using the design decision of having no calls to the free C library function so that it ran with a bigger memory footprint than other compilers but vastly simplified the design of the program. This worked because the memory requirements of the program are proportional to the size of the source file being compiled.
• Shawn Hargreaves for producing the multi-platform games library Allegro. I wrote my first PC game called Dangerous Driving under Allegro and I am presently using it to write three computer games.
• Eli Zaretskii for helping me overcome my install problems and learning difficulties with GNU Emacs (via the Internet newsgroup gnu.emacs.help).
• Frank Tipler for writing a book explaining how religion will eventually become a branch of science. I have written an article about his book on my website.
• Bill Gates who along with others founded Microsoft. Because of his tremendous success in business we all love to hate him, but it is hard to deny his intelligence that caused him to succeed so dramatically. For example, when he first wrote the Microsoft Windows operating system it ran like a dog at the time but he foresaw that computers would rapidly get a lot faster than they were at the time, rendering Windows usable. He also recognised that people tend to favour standardisation in the field of computers, and foresaw that his operating systems would become the default standard. Despite Microsoft's the present domination of the computer software market I believe that a free operating system (such as GNU/Linux) will ultimately triumph.
• Sir Edmund Hillary is probably New Zealand's most famous New Zealander. He was the first person to conquer the world's highest mountain, Mount Everest. Then he re-payed his debt to the local Nepalese people by building schools and hospitals for them. Although he is now dead, Hillary is the first living New Zealander to appear on our national currency. It must have been believed that the probability of Hillary turning into a child molester was low enough to risk placing his face on every $5 of New Zealand currency.
• Peter Jackson who put New Zealand on the map as a place to make high quality high computer graphics content films such as most notably Heavenly Creatures, The Lord of the Rings Trilogy and King Kong. His earlier splatter films (such as Bad Taste and Braindead) are worth a look too.
• Mike Leigh is one of the world's greatest living film directors. All of his films are groundbreaking in different ways. Happy-Go-Lucky, Secrets and Lies, Career Girls, and All or Nothing are emotional dramas that are impossible to hate, whereas Vera Drake and Topsy Turvy are compelling period drama, and Naked is dark and shocking, although too dark for most tastes.
• Kim Stolz from America's Next Top Model. Why is that the most attractive women are lesbians? (This is just my opinion of course!) You can find pictures of her using Google Image Search.
• Shawn Johnson is a gold medal winning Olympic gymnast who is particulary gorgeous to look at.

Useful websites

• Wikipedia is a free encyclopedia that anyone can contribute to. Has nearly two million articles in English and almost all written to a very high standard of scholarship. I use Wikipedia almost exclusively for the links on the The Greatest Artists of all Time page of my website. You can view the pages I have written for Wikipedia. I have also written an article about Wikipedia versus Britannica. This website heavily borrows from the layout style of Wikipedia, especially the (lack of) capitalisation of titles/headings and the (lack of) italicisation of certain items.
• The site wiktionary.org is wikipedia's version of a wiki-based Open Content dictionary.
• The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is the definitive site for philosophical topics.
• TradeMe is the definitive site for buying and selling goods within New Zealand. Be warned however that this website is highly addictive.
• Click here to play old Commodore 64 games in a Java enabled browser. Unfortunately they don't have my favourite C64 games: Wizard of Wor and Delta, but they do have good ones like Ghosts 'n Goblins and IO.

Favourite TV programmes

• The Simpsons. Favourite ten episodes listed roughly in order of decreasing merit:
  
  

  Rank	Episode	Season	Code	Synopsis
  1.	"Hank Scorpio"	8 / 18	3F23	Homer is hired for a new job on the basis of his supposed expertise.
  2.	"King-Size Homer"	7 / 18	3F05	Homer purposely gains 61 pounds in weight to qualify for a disability allowance.
  3.	"Three Eyed Fish"	2 / 18	7F01	Mr Burns runs for mayor.
  4.	"Itchy, Scratchy & Poochie"	8 / 18	4F12	A new character is added to the Itchy & Scratchy Show
  5.	"Demoxinil"	2 / 18	7F02	Homer finds a miracle treatment for baldness.
  6.	"Dental Plan"	4 / 18	9F15	Homer becomes a union representative.
  7.	"Brush with Greatness"	2 / 18	7F18	The Simpsons visit Mount Splashmore and Marge paints Mr. Burns.
  8.	"The Babysitter Bandit"	1 / 18	7G01	The Simpsons face a babysitter with sinister intentions.
  9.	"Marge vs. the Monorail"	4 / 18	9F10	Springfield invests in a monorail.
  10.	"Frank Grimes"	8 / 18	4F19	Homer meets his nemesis with hilarious consequences.

  
  I have found The Simpsons Archive helpful to compose the above list. In my opinion the earliest episodes are better than the more recent ones, due to an apparent lack of good new ideas in the more recent episodes.
• Seinfeld is famously known as a show about nothing, or more accurately: pondering over the minutiae of everyday social interactions.
• Whose Line Is It Anyway? The older British version has a wider range of jokes and comedians than the newer American version.
• Fawlty Towers is the greatest British comedy series of all time and it seems like a travesty that they only produced twelve episodes. It tells a story of a long-suffering man Basil Fawtly whose spirit is regularly crushed by his domineering wife Sybil. He is constantly entering into hilarious misunderstandings with his waiter Manuel whose command of the English language is frustratingly poor. Basil is also rude, sarcastic and cruel so that the audience is not disappointed when he gets his just desserts. Their funniest episode is called "Communication Problems" and is about how Basil secretly makes a winning bet on a horse but is foiled by a near-deaf woman who refuses to turn her hearing aid on because as she says: "It runs the batteries down!".

  The concept of a flawed character ultimately receiving negative consequences applies to most artistic works. The most beautiful and morally superior characters in an artistic work almost always never receive negative ultimate consequences while the uglier and morally inferior characters almost always do receive negative ultimate consequences. Most artists seem to be aware (either consciously or unconsciously) of this principle. The purpose of this principle is to increase our enjoyment of a work of art. Our emotional investment in the beautiful and morally superior characters is always rewarded with dividends and our emotional divestment (hatred) of uglier and morally inferior characters is also rewarded with dividends of the opposite kind. An example of this principle in action is horror movies where the people who have extramarital sex are almost always killed while the virgins almost always survive to the end of the story.

Free computer programs that I find useful

Photo: GNU Emacs

• GNU Emacs is a text editor and a religion in itself that is available on almost all platforms. Here is a list of its features, listed in order of decreasing coolness:
  • Support for editing programs in virtually any language. I use Emacs to edit the following file types: C, C++, Java, Lisp, Makefile, HTML, LaTeX, Pov-Ray and binary. If Emacs does not support your favourite language, it can be made so that it does.
  • Built-in Emacs Lisp programming language for implementing virtually any conceivable feature. Click here to read an article about all of the features that I have added to Emacs.
  • Customisable Syntax Highlighting:
    • C/C++ keywords, comments and strings in their own colours.
    • C/C++ global variables in a different colour from local variables (a feature invented by me). The downside of this feature is that global variables must be prefixed by the word global_. Using too many global variables can be a source of bugs in a program, so it is useful to have syntax highlighting of their use. The dabbrev feature (see below) helps to mitigate the cost in terms of extra typing from longer variable names.
    • C/C++ Super Comments (a feature invented by me). Super Comments start with /// and end with the end of line. Super Comments are highlighted brighter then normal C/C++ comments and are analogous to Java's /** ... */ comments in that they contain text for the programmer to read rather that just commented-out code.
    • C/C++ Allegro graphics library function calls in their own colour (a feature invented by me). Whatever libraries you use, it is possible to set up syntax highlighting for those libraries.
    • You can view a screenshot of Emacs' syntax highlighting using my personal choices of colours. Note: keywords are in bold, function names are in a bright yellow background, types are in blue bold, comments are in grey, super comments are in red, variable definitions are in blue class properties are orange and global variables are in green. I am using a variant of the much maligned Hungarian notation so that Emacs is able to highlight globals and class properties in different colours. Without Hungarian notation it would not be possible to do the syntax highlighting so that is why I use it.
  • Integrated make, gdb, grep, dired, info, calendar and eshell etc. means that programmers almost never need to leave Emacs while doing useful work.
  • Dynamic Abbreviations (dabbrev). For example: press z, and then repeatedly press Alt-/ to cycle through all words in memory that start with "z". This feature allows you to use long variable names (which are more descriptive than short variable names) without needing to type them in every time you use them.
  • Automatic indentation, so there is no need to waste time aligning code by hand.
  • Unlimited undo/redo.
  • Find matching brackets.
  • Re-definable keys to reduce the risk of developing R.S.I. (Repetitive Strain Injury). For example I have defined all of the function keys F1-F12 to achieve different commonly-used operations, such as F8 to undo and F9 to compile. I have also redefined the command find-file from Control-x Control-f to the shorter Control-f because it is used so much.

    The downside of Emacs is that it is inevitably weighed down by its many features and can be quite daunting to learn. As a result I would only recommend this program to fellow nerds.

• The Mozilla Firefox Web Browser gives me freedom from pop-up windows that plagues the Microsoft Internet Explorer Web Browser. Mozilla is too slow downloading images and in this case I have to revert to Internet Explorer.
• The GNU m4 preprocessor which I use for designing all of my websites. Of its many features, the ones that I use are file inclusion, macros, conditional constructs and shell commands. An example of its use is the navigation aids at the top and bottom of every page in this website. I have written an article that shows how I use m4 in this website.
• The GNU/Linux system which includes such programs as: bash ls mv cp grep find gcc make tar gzip etc. I use Windows XP in conjunction with the Unix subsystems Cygwin and MinGW. For generating my website I use Flex to transform code written in C/C++/Java/Lisp/Makefile to HTML format containing syntax highlighting.
• IrfanView is a Windows graphics program. It has a lot of useful features such as cropping, resizing, format conversion, batch conversion, gamma correction, image effects, etc.
• Microsoft® Paint is a surprisingly useful program given its lack of advanced features. It might not deserve a place in this list however, as it is only free with a paid or "cracked" copy of Microsoft Windows. Microsoft Paint and IrfanView when used together using the Copy and Paste buttons form the basis of a comprehensive image manipulation system.
• EAC and Foobar2000 are a pair of applications that serve as a superior replacement for Windows Media Player for the purposes of (respectively) ripping and playing music files. Foobar2000 is superior to Windows Media Player because you can change the artist name and album name of multiple music files at the same time, whereas with Windows Media Player you need to change them one at a time. Also the random play feature of Foobar2000 also is more random than Windows Media Player's random play feature. EAC is superior to Windows Media Player because it rips tracks with fewer errors. I have purchased a 250GB Hard Drive for the sole purpose of storing my entire CD collection so that tracks can be played at random with no repeats for about 10 days of continuous playing. This gives better performance than most radio stations and anyhow is better than any radio station because it only plays songs that I like and have chosen to be in the playlist. For those of you who are interested in my stereo, here are my specs:
  • Cambridge Audio DacMagic DAC for audiophile quality sound from a PC's USB output socket. This is a vastly superior alternative to using a low-fi cheap PC sound card.
  • Pioneer A400 integrated amplifier
  • B&W CDM1 Special Edition loudspeakers
  • Naim cables connecting the amplifier to the speakers
  • LME speaker stands
  • Unknown brand RCA cables connecting the DAC to the amplifier