Kevin Guyll

I am a self-employed computer consultant / computer technical specialist / systems integrator, based in Winchcombe
(near Cheltenham), Gloucestershire.

What do I do? I am never sure how to answer this question, the best description I have thought of so far is
'Computer Odd-Job Man'. Here is some of the stuff I have worked on:

My background is mainly in Unix, including these flavours of Unix:
Early on this was mostly using dumb terminals, such as Altos V and Wyse 120 so I spent hours writing
termcap, terminfo and custom terminal databases for all sorts of Unix based products, including:
Similarly I spent a lot of time writing and testing printer definitions and I remember spending hours trying
to find out where pound signs had gone (an amount in UK pounds in a document would get printed out
as US dollars).

Then when PCs on desks became common people wanted to avoid having both a PC and a dumb terminal,
so I got involved with all sorts of terminal emulation programs, protocol stacks (eg. TCP/IP and Novell
together) and networking. This involved using products such as:
The next step was accessing data stored in Unix based databases from PCs (eg. to pull it back into a spreadsheet).
I first did this using things such as utilities written on Unix to produce a csv export file and to copy it to the PC
using rcp (say with the rcp server in NCSA telnet) but then integration products, sometimes known as glue
products, came along. Products I have use in this category include:
During this time people were moving more and more to Microsoft based products, so I have worked on:
Along the way came greater use of the Internet, so I have connected all sorts of systems and networks to the
internet. Products I have used here include:
Recently there seems to be a swing away from Microsoft to Open Source products. Open source products
I have worked with include:
Everybody seems to be looking for an open source mail server which would replace Microsoft
Exchange and run on Linux. I haven't found it yet, but I have high hopes for the Hula Project. You
can put together a solution using various products, but at the moment you always have to buy some
commercial software if you want connect to your server using Outlook (this is needed so that
Outlook can connect to an IMAP server).

I have had to do a lot of small-scale programming along the way, including:
I can 'do' web sites, but I am not really a designer. I have done a lot of technical work on web sites to
do things such as feedback forms, simple databases, access to databases (through ODBC and using
CGI utilities written in Informix 4GL). Most of this has been through modifying open source products
in Perl, PHP and ASP (active server pages). I do maintain a few web sites:
Lots of organisations seem to spend a fortune getting a web site, but then never make any changes to
it (I am thinking of something like a restaurant showing the xmas menu from 3 years ago at the height
of summer on their web site). If that sounds like you then I could keep your site updated for a small
monthly fee, or I could modify the way the site works so that you can update it yourself easily.

Projects I am working on at the moment include:

Controlling spam (junk email) on MS Exchange 5.5 on NT4 server - I have been using ASSP.

Converting MS Word documents to PDF and then flash movie format on Linux. For this I have been using
OpenOffice with a macro to convert from .doc to .pdf and then pdf2swf from Swftools to convert from
.pdf to .swf format. This was done for a website and has to run as a background process, so OpenOffice
has to have a virtual X display to run in. For this I used Vncserver.

I recently moved a legacy application running on SCO OpenServer 5.0.2 on hardware which was about to
fail to a new server running OpenServer 5.0.6.

I can also make my own cables if needs be (I mean I can work a soldering iron!). I don't do pure hardware
repairs (what I mean is if something was working until you got a blue flash and smoke then don't call me
- unless you want to replace it with something else). However, I have experienced so many different products
and I am generally good at problem solving, so I can usually puzzle my way through getting something to work
that has never worked properly because it wasn't configured correctly in the first place.

So there you go. That is why I end up saying computer odd job man!

Here is an email address which will reach me. Sorry it isn't clickable, I'm fed up of Spam!

This page was last updated on 10 January 2006.