Homepage for Tom O'Connor

I'm a systems engineer, although in the past I've been a web designer / developer, and now seem to have settled into linux systems administration, and scalability engineering. 
I think it's actually more what I'm suited to... Although I do like to keep my hand in the web design field. I've recently been redesigning and relaunching my personal website (yes, the one you're looking at!). My last major project was redesigning the corporate site for DB Education.

I've worked on various projects over the last few years, there's more information on the Projects page about some of these.

I'm passionate about well designed and readable websites, accessibility across platforms, and valid markup. I'd like to become more proficient with networking, and computer security. 

I consider myself proficient in Python, PHP, Perl, C, C++, Java,  XHTML/CSS as well as Visual Basic, and a variety of Microsoft platforms and Office packages.

One of my latest projects has involved writing lots of perl plugins for Nagios to monitor a variety of systems where I work. I have also been writing plugins for Munin, an rrdtool based grapher for historical monitoring of system properties.

I have been using Linux since 2000, primarily Red Hat and derivatives (CentOS & Fedora), and Slackware. However, I have used Ubuntu since 2005, which has taken over as my main desktop and server platform.

Until 2008, I was studying Bioinformatics at the University of Birmingham, this has given me experience with bioinformatics tools such as BLAST and EMBOSS, as well as Linux shell, Perl and related packages.