Alan Richmond

EncycloZine.com Richmond Alan :

In A Nutshell

• I live in England with 6 cats, 2 sons, and 1 wife.
• I've lived in several other countries: Belgium, Luxembourg, France, Germany, USA.
• I built and operate several web sites: Artzia, Eluzions, Kosmoi, diXionary, EncycloZine, Curious Minds.
• I founded one of NASA's first web sites, wrote the first web calculator (WebCalc), and founded the first site in XHTML (EncycloZine).
• Most of my career has been spent as a scientific software developer (e.g. for Hubble), and latterly (since 1993), as a web developer.
• My wife, Lucy, was a programmer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore. We met by both working on the HST Data Management Facility. Our children Neil and Mark owe their existence to the HST.
• I've met Tim Berners-Lee (multiple times, including job interview for W3 webmaster), Frank Drake, Jill Tarter, Kent Cullers (SETI folk, the latter 2 portrayed in Contact). I have a couple of TimBL anecdotes to tell sometime...
• I founded the Web Developer's Virtual Library, the first commercial web site for web developers. I sold it to internet.com. Altogether it must have made me a million dollars, but unfortunately I invested heavily in tech stocks...
• I don't "believe in" anything (especially Western religions), but I'm fascinated by the speculations concerning the 'multiverse' (i.e. multiple universes). Contrary to some opinions, this doesn't contravene Occam's Razor (simple theories are preferred to complex ones), because the existence of a solitary habitable universe implies extremely strong constraints, whereas the multiverse implies none.

Here are some of my major web sites. The earlier ones (further down) have of course evolved somewhat.

	Curious Minds	Science Kits and Educational Games. Are You Curious?
	Artzia	Articles, books, posters, videos, etc on arts, humanities, history, etc.
	Eluzions	Free online games, puzzles, pictures, optical illusions, and more!
	Kosmoi	Worlds of Science, Nature, and Technology.
	EncycloZine	A concise illustrated encyclopedia, and a compendium of diversions.
	WDVL.com	Web Developer's Virtual Library (now owned by internet.com).
	W3Browse	Query astrophysics satellite data and deliver products (e.g. images) (paper).
	RPS	Remote Proposal Submission system
	WebStars	Astrophysics in Cyberspace (paper).
StarChild	A Learning Center for Young Astronomers.

I've lived in several countries: England, where I was born (Ely, Cambs); Belgium, Luxembourg, France, Germany, and the USA. Each one has a distinct culture and lifestyle. It surprised me when I went to the USA to find that I was more European than I had realised. Although Britain and the USA have much in common - e.g. similar languages - American culture is perhaps the most alien from my perspective. Indeed, I was a resident alien.

Most of my career has been as a scientific software engineer and sometimes team leader creating user interfaces, databases, and real-time control and data acquisition systems for Doel nuclear power station, synchrotron radiation experiment, Hubble Space Telescope, High Energy Astrophysics Science Archive, European Synchrotron Radiation Facility, Hubble Space Telescope, European Southern Observatory, Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics, Joint European Torus. I have presented several papers on scientific software systems.

I've been a web developer since 1993. My first site was one of NASA's earliest. I've been using the Internet since well before it became famous. I first used it to collaborate with the Space Telescope Science Institute when I worked for the Space Telescope European Coordinating Facility at the European Southern Observatory in Munich, Germany. It was on a visit to the ST ScI in Baltimore that I met Lucy, who was a programmer there. We were both working on the Data Management Facility, aka the archive.

The Internet and WWW have been and remain, a central part of my life. A decade or so ago, it was the province of a few academics and scientists, and we used arcane UNIX commands to operate it. That began to change in the early 90's with the creation of the WWW and a browser called Mosaic (from the NCSA), and the move towards commercialisation.

Having been one of the first web developers, I've been able to pioneer this revolutionary technology. Not like stars such as Tim Berners-Lee and Marc Andreessen, but I've had a few 'firsts'. I founded the web's first commercial site for web developers in 1994, and the web's first XHTML site (EncycloZine) in 1998. I wrote the web's first calculator - WebCalc - in about 1994. It was a Perl/CGI script that presented a pocket calculator.

In recent years I became known as a teacher of web technologies such as XHTML. I have presented advanced HTML & CGI tutorials at many conferences, including the International World Wide Web Conferences series (Boston & Darmstadt). and DCI's WebWorlds. I was technical editor for HTML & CGI Unleashed by John December et al (Sams.Net), and for Web Database Primer Plus by Piroz Mohseni (Waite Group Press).

Web Developer's Virtual Library is an encyclopedia of Java, HTML, JavaScript, CGI, DHTML, XML, Perl, web design and domain name tutorials and resources. The project started as a hotlist called WebStars on a NASA computer in late 1993. It became part of The WWW Virtual Library (originally at CERN) in September 1994. WDVL was acquired by Mecklermedia for its internet.com family of sites in March 1998. I resigned in March 1999, having spent 5 years developing WDVL.

My brief foray into Java: Encyclogram draws harmonograms, spirographs, and Lissajous figures. The decaying motion of the plot fills in the shapes with their spiralling-in echo. Encyclogram can also draw the curves in varying colors against a black background, resulting in breath-taking works of art that can be as beautiful as fractals.

Click on the picture to see some of my photos. This one is of my 10-yr old son, Neil. He was lying on the floor where the spectrum from a prism fell (I rotated the image). This picture is one of those breath-taking moments that come along so rarely in a lifetime. It captures the sweetness of this young person, and colors it a little more...

My personal interests and hobbies: maintaining EncycloZine; studying and making optical illusions; science; puzzles; Web Design; photography; astronomy; SETI.

Hire Me!

Seeking a leadership position in a scientific / technical company or academic / research institute, utilising my strong background in scientific software and web development.

JET	ESRF	HST	HEASARC
Joint European Torus	European Synchrotron Radiation Facility	Hubble Space Telescope	High Energy Astrophysics Science Archive Research Center

CuriousMinds.co.UK

Chemistry Lab £20.00	Hot Wires Electronics Set £39.99	Motorised Solar System and Planetarium £18.95
Solar Radiometer £22.50	Mirage Desktop 3D Hologram Maker £24.95	Earth & Constellation Globe £39.95