General Stuff About Me

My name is Julian Porter. I work in a number of IT-related areas, plus some non-IT stuff.

Robotics

I run a small business designing control systems for mobile robots. if you're interested check out JP Embedded Solutions. I am particularly interested in applying some rigour to the design process, so using tools like executable UML and the Model Driven Architecture to ensure that most of the work goes into making sure the requirements are met rather than fiddling with microcontrollers.

Web Design

I am interested in designing web applications, and general web design, and am in the process of standing up a small business, JP Embedded Solutions (site under construction). I offer the following services:

Web design: I design web-sites with or without active content.
Providing a light-weight active framework that reduces building and maintaining a conventional website to editing an XML document.
Providing canned web applications (such as a library management tool).
Developing general modules for things like strong user authentication, managing role-based user authentication to web-apps, etc.

General IT

I am interested in ways of making IT delivery into less of an art and more of a deterministic craft. Thus my key areas of research are:

MDA and UML
Agile delivery processes

For more information on all of these topics see my IT page.

Other Stuff

For all of this see my personal website

Music
Writing
Philosophy
Maths

My MediaWiki Extensions

MakeArticle

This is an extension that, given a template, presents the user with a form in which they can fill in the template's parameters. If they then click a button, it will go ahead and build a page based on those specifications. Essentially, it takes the idea from extensions like CreateArticle and extends it by allowing the text pre-loaded into the new page to be configurable on the fly, so providing a handy tool for creating new pages by filling in a form.

As a handy extra feature, the style of the form is defined in an external style-sheet that the wiki manager can edit to get a look-and-feel of their own choosing (the code to do this was based on PageCSS).

NewPageCSS

This is an extension that uses the tag <css> to allow you to insert a CSS style-sheet into wiki pages. It is based on PageCSS, which is a great etension, so rather old, and I had to rewrite the code to make it work on MediaWiki 1.16.0. And given how useful an extension it is, I decided to share it.