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November 01, 1998
John
A self portrait taken at the National Portrait Gallery, London.
Most of my secondary education was at the The United World College of South East Asia and the Harrogate Grammar School. After a year off in between to muck about I then went on to a Computer Science degree at The University of Hertfordshire.
Places I've Worked...
I started off working for Rampage games, on the Play By Mail games 'St. Valentine's Day Massacre II' and 'MEP'. But, that didn't work out very well, so I did a degree. Part of this involved working for a year at the British Standards Institution. I tested C compilers, and POSIX Operating Systems... and met Neil Martin and Danny Chacon. After my degree I dossed about some more then became employee number N (where N is between 3 and 5) at Intelligent Games. There I met the cheeky Allan Murphy and had a lot of fun working on a PC game called SimIsle. But, that didn't work out too well either, so I went to Pixel Innovations to work on TERMiTE, a Terminal Emulation application, with Mike Woolley. Then I went to Octel Communications to work on the stupendous Unified Messenger project. Here I worked with Michael Wilson, David Boreham, Marius Milner, Pete Rowley, and Thomas Stubbs. After a respectible interval I followed Mr. Boreham to Netscape Communications to work on the even more stupendous Directory Server. From there I spent a year with a failed startup called 'eTime Capital' which was poised to shake up the world of financial supply chains - whatever that means. And, finally I worked with Sleepcat Software on an embedded database management system called Berkeley DB XML.
Hobbies
My company, Game Pie Ltd, which has developed a Play By Mail game called Godfather. I'm a member of the The Association of C and C++ Users, and am the editor of their ACCU Professional Programming magazine Overload. I'm also a very inactive member of the Computer Conservation Society, the IEEE Computer Society, and the ACM.
Publications
- Since 1997 I have been the editor of the ACCU C++ SIG magazine Overload, and I occasionally contribute to the ACCent newsletter of the USA chapter of the ACCU.
- I was the principal contributor and editor of the LDUP Replication Architecture Internet-Draft.
- I contributed a chapter to this Addison Wesley book: XML Data Management: Native XML and XML-Enabled Database Systems.
- A feature article for BYTE on Berkeley DB XML.
I have six patents pending in the area of directory information systems:
- Replica Update Vectors; John Merrells, Olga Natkovich, Gordon Good, Pinaki Shah, and Mark C. Smith.
- Replication Architecture for a Directory Server; John Merrells, Olga Natkovich, Gordon Good, Ludovic Poitou, and Mark C. Smith.
- Change Sequence Number Generator; Gordon Good, John Merrells, Ludovic Poitou, Olga Natkovich, Mark C. Smith, and Pinaki Shah.
- Update Resolution Procedure for a Directory Server; Gordon Good, John Merrells, Mark C. Smith, Olga Natkovich and Rich Megginson.li>
- Directory Server Software Architecture; Mark F Wahl, John Merrells, and Mark C. Smith.
- Uniqueid-based addressing in a directory server; John Merrells, Olga Natkovich, Gordon Good, Mark Smith
And, I have one patent pending within the area of financial document reconciliation.
- Document Reconciliation System; John Merrells, David Boreham.
Posted by John at November 1, 1998 12:00 PM