Curriculum Vitae of Terry Burton
BSc Hons Computer Science (Leicester)

Contact Details

Career Summary

Current Responsibilities

• Systems Architect (Unix and networks), IT Services at the University of Leicester
• Owner and developer of some open source projects, most notably the ubiquitous Barcode Writer in Pure PostScript, as used by NASA: http://freshmeat.net/projects/postscriptbarcode
• Information technology consultant to a number of small- to large-sized enterprises, including SLT Hostings Ltd, and Leicester North-West Community Forum

Career Achievements

Qualifications (all certificates are available upon request)

List of modules: Program Design, Logic and Discrete Structures, Computer Systems, Information Systems, Operating Systems and Networks, Algorithms and Data Structures, Software Engineering and Professional Practice, Functional Programming, Object Oriented Software Engineering, Automata + Languages and Computation, Object Oriented Programming Using C++, Logic Programming, Design and Analysis of Algorithms, Software Engineering Project¹, Communication and Concurrency, Programming Secure and Distributed Systems, Semantics of Programming Languages, Compression Methods for Multimedia, Computer Science Project Part 1 & Part 2 (abstract below)

¹Awarded for being the best of all of the group projects and subsequently implemented in the University of Leicester Student Union Second Hand Bookshop

A Levels (May/June 2000)

GCSEs (May/June 1998)

A*A* in Science (double), A* in Mathematics, A* in English
3 A*'s, 2 A's, 2 B's in other subjects including English Literature, IT & Business Studies, History, Geography, Religious Studies (short course), Design and Technology (Graphic Products), Expressive Arts

Other Achievements

I hold a full, clean UK driving license. I've passed the UK Pass+ driving course, and I have attended a defensive driving training programme.

Education Since Age 11+

School Arranged Work Experience

"It was a pleasure to have Terry in the department for two weeks. He learned to deal with our computer system quickly and was able to contribute to the work that is done here. I have never had such a capable work experience student. I hope he goes on to a career in our area." - Professor Martin Barstow, Head of Physics and Astronomy

Relevant Computing Experience

Degree dissertation (abstract): "The project describes the development and evaluation of a novel system for efficiently solving (in parallel) distributable problems by using Java applets. It begins by introducing the concepts of distributed computing, parallel computing as well as distinguishing between web-based computing and Internetworking. Current trends in both household computing and scientific computing are stated to justify the increasingly significant role of distributed computing in all of its forms. Literature from many well-known and less well-known sources is presented to outline the present state of distributed computing, and a set of detailed requirements that problems must satisfy if they can be efficiently solved by distributed parallel computing methods is given. The specific requirements of any distributable problem are supplemented by a structured hierarchy of the major requirements of a software system for solving this group of problems. We discuss the major technical limitations of Java applets that inevitably shape the topology of the distributed network thus affecting their suitability for distributed computing, as has been overstated by prominent research papers on this subject. This is countered by an explanation of how when the modern port-forwarding ability of routers is combined with Java applets we can dispel claims about the very limited scalability of an applet-based distributed processing system. The project goes on to describe an object-oriented design that we created for a distributed processing system that uses Java applets to process arbitrary data. More formalism is added to this design by specifying the concurrent activities of the active agents of the design and their communication in a formal process calculus. It then describes the task of programming our implementation of the design that we then evaluate according to the criteria of its requirements specification. Analysis of test results obtained by using our implementation to solve variants of the 'function on all subsets' problem are presented, and then conclusions about these results, with particular regard to the fitness of the product for solving problems in our group of interest, are drawn. Finally we conclude the core of the project by presenting a summary of what has been learned about distributed parallel processing with Java applets from our research and experiments." (Available here - pdf 988Kb)
Previous project: I developed as part of a university project a system for managing a second hand book store. I'm currently a paid maintainer of this system that was subsequently bought from me by the University of Leicester Second Hand Book Store who adopted it because of its fitness above their previous professionally designed product. The system presents an event-driven graphical user interface and is programmed entirely in Java so it will run on any Java compliant OS supported by a MySQL (or similar) database. Being firstly academic in nature, based around communication and concurrency theory, the software will potentially scale to a massive distributed system imposing no limit on the number of heterogeneous connected clients that can connect from anywhere via the Internet.
Previous project: I developed the UK's first major e-commerce website retailing specialist foods via the Internet for a growing and successful company GoodnessDirect. The site presents a fully-functional shopping system that has been written from scratch using primarily Perl/CGI and C++ to access a MySQL database. Site features include SSL security for checkout, RSA encryption of personal information, customisable browsing environment, favourites basket, previous order history, storable profiles, roaming access to basket and details, top other products, among sophisticated features. http://www.goodnessdirect.co.uk/
Operating systems: Unix (Linux, Solaris, FreeBSD, Mac OS-X), Windows (9X, ME, NT/2000, XP, Server 2003, Vista), VMS, MS-DOS.
Languages: Java, C++, Perl, .NET / Mono, CGI Scripting, Ruby, Haskell, Prolog, Pascal, PostScript, BASIC, XML technologies (including XSLT, XQuery), others...
Development environments: Eclipse, Borland C++ Builder, Delphi, Sun One Studio, Microsoft Visual Studio, Emacs, Vi.
Other apps: MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle 10g (and other SQL database implementations), Exim, qMail, Samba, BIND, LaTeX, many Microsoft applications (incl. Exchange Server, Terminal Server).
Hardware: i386, Alpha, Mac, Cisco routers and switches, JetDirect print servers, DEC terminal servers, ADSL, Cable, ISDN.

A Little Bit More About Myself

Computing has captured my interest since I received an Acorn Electron when I was five years old and started to occupy myself by typing in the sample programs in BASIC and 6502 assembler from the reference manual. I quickly learned how to program the Electron and a little later, the Commodore 64. Since then I've programmed a number of PCs from an x86 to a EMT64 to a Digital Alpha Jensen. I have been programming for Windows and Unix in a variety of languages. I'm particuarly interested in supporting open source software initiatives such as GNU/Linux.

I had an excellent opportunity to put my computing skills to use during my school-arranged work experience at the Physics and Astronomy Department at Leicester University where I assisted in processing satelite telescope data for the Starlink project under Professor Martin Barstow, Head of Physics and Astronomy.

I completed secondary school at sixteen where I was editor of the award-winning school newspaper and a prefect, and I completed sixth-form college at nineteen having obtained excellent GCSE and A Level results.

As an undergraduate computer science student I found I had enough time to become involved in a number of activities such as supporting the computer system of the Student Union Second Hand Bookshop that I created as part of a computer science project and also in the development and maintainance of an e-commerce website that I wrote whilst full-time employed.

I concluded my student life graduating top of the class of an honours degree in computer science and have won some academic awards during the course. I continue my involvement with the Department of Computer Science employed to do casual teaching of undergraduate computer science and engineering students during term-time.

I have been offered a full-time PhD studentship (description here - pdf 7.86Kb) between the Department of Computer Science and the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Leicester for a project that involves research into the efficent compression of XML-based data whilst allowing complex in-memory queries to be performed on the compressed data. The PPARC funded studentship in e-science has close links with the AstroGrid project and benefits the wider Grid computing community. I decided not to pursue this research opportunity because it would involve terminating too many of my other responsibilities and activities, but since that time I have remained involved in computing at the University where I now work full-time.

I have grown quite interested in sound engineering through my involvement in productions run by my church and by supporting events run by Midland Sound and Lighting PA hire company.

I've held several casual jobs (including teaching undergraduates at Leicester University) and have had a few periods of full-time employment. The bulk of my full-time employment has been for House of Goodness Ltd, a medium sized enterprise employing about seventy personel, where I have gained valuable experience administrating and developing several different types of computer system.

Unusally for somebody of my age I now have over ten years credible programming experience and I'm familiar with a wide range of computer systems, software and modern programming languages.

I maintain a blog at http://www.terryburton.co.uk/blog which gives details of some of my recent activities.

Interests and Activities

• Computing: grid computing, XML technologies, massive-scale parallel processing with Java applets (degree dissertation), cutting-edge e-commerce, computability theory, open source software
• Theoretical physics: high-energy physics and the early universe, quantum theory, string theory, quantum mechanical computering, practical approaches to nuclear fusion
• Audio Engineering: live FOH/monitor mixing, live/studio recording, post-production mastering

Referees