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Email: ben_AT_neverfear_DOT_org

Suppose I should put something more relevant that "Testing profile-editing scripts" here?

...

Me

Erm.. Basically I do lots of varying computer-related stuff, with a bias towards various forms of media.

I do lots of programming, photography and combinations and variants of the two. Including visual-effects compositing, film making.

You can see a some of my photos on Flickr: http://flickr.com/photos/-dbr/

I know a few programming languages. First "big" one I learned was PHP, which I still use for web-programming. After that I learned Perl. Most recently, I have been using Python - which for the foreseeable future is the only language I think I'll need (with the possible exception of C/C++).

Other notable things I've done... While I was at college, a few friends and I creates a "no-budget" feature-length film, called "Deadly Game 2". We are planning to release it online for free-download, something I need to look into further.
You can see most of our other videos on Craig(/Razor D's) Youtube account: http://youtube.com/user/RAZORD

I've done live music recordings for a few gigs, including Simon Kirke and Larry Oakes (Drummer of "Free", and keyboard player from "Bad Company" and "Foreigner"), String Driven Thing, Big Brother and the Holding Company, The Hendry McCullough Band (of which I also created the CD's front-cover)


Computer stuff I use:
Currently a Macbook Pro, running OS X 10.5 Leopard. TextMate as a text-editor (or vim when using command-line stuff, or Programmers Notepad on Windows). irssi as an IRC client, and bitlbee (via irssi) as an instant-messaging client. I use Camino as a browser (Firefox on Windows), Mail.app as an email client (Or GMails web-interface on Windows). iTunes as a music-player (Foobar2000 on Windows, with iTunes to organize music). MPUI (mplayer UI) as a media player (Quicktime + Perian on OS X). Transmission as a torrent-client (uTorrent on Windows). iTerm as a terminal-emulator (PuTTY on Windows).

I have used Final Cut Pro extensively (I also have a Final Cut Pro 5 Level 1 certification). I have used Apple Shake a fair amount, and have played with After Effects, eyeOn Fusion and The Foundry's Nuke a bit. I have started to learn Autodesk Maya again (after using it years ago)

Long profile

As if the previous bit wasn't long enough, I had a much longer one written (about 1000 words). It's more detailed, if you care to read it, click the "show more lines" button

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Since I was a small child I have been using computers. My first memory of using a computer was a laptop my Dad brought home from work one weekend - It either had a greyscale, or ~16 colour screen. I remember playing with Paint on it (it ran Windows 3.1, and I have no idea what specs it was, as I was about 6 years old at the time, I think..)

The family got our first computer when I was about.. 9 years old? A 133MHz computer with about 64MB of memory - A Windows 95 machine I'm sure is still in the Garage at home. I remember playing Ski-Free in the Packard Bell Home-navigator application (A game I rediscovered online a few weeks ago, incidentally)

When I wasn't at primary school, or playing on the computer, I always enjoyed building stuff with LEGO. Well, I still do, I just haven't played with it for years!

When I was about 10 years old or so, I found an old camera, and saved up money and bought a roll of film for it. Ever since then I've enjoyed taking photos, progressing from an early ���£300 3-megapixel digital camera, to a Fuji S7000 digital camera which I used for a few years, to my most recent digital SLR: A Canon 350D, a 18-55mm default lens, a 1:1 marco lens, and a 80-300mm telephoto lens.
All the lenses are fairly cheap Sigma lenses, I have never been picky about lenses - I believe an image captured on a cheap low-end digital camera are just as.. valid as ones on a super-high-end camera with a lens that costs more than a car..

I do photography primarily as a hobby - I am sure if I wanted too, I could do it professionally - But I'm am hesitant to do so as it seems like it would stop being fun very quickly.

While I'm on the subject of photography, you can see some of the photos I've taken on Flickr (under the username mr_dbr) at http://flickr.com/photos/_dbr/


To go back a bit, when I was.. Well I've no idea what age I was - but I got interested in robotics though Robot Wars - I built lots of little remote-controller robots - mostly combinations of R/C plane transmitter/receivers, servos, LEGO parts (wheels mostly), and duct-tape and superglue.
I still have two of the robots I built in the garage (A tiny 100 gram one, made out of a bit of plastic, two servos, LEGO wheels and some R/C control stuff, and a larger one using two drills, and some golf-cart wheels I think.)

Though the robotics stuff, I stumbled upon the BASIC Stamp chip - a programmable micro-controller, programmed in P-BASIC - the first language I ever learned (Well, computer language, that is)

This sparked my interesting in programming. From P-BASIC, I think I learned PHP, a language I used for a few years, mostly for web-design stuff (another interest I had, and have designed a bunch of websites for a few local companies).
I have created a lot of scripts in PHP, nearly all just personal projects I felt like making.

Over the years, I've learned many other programming languages. The biggest ones being Perl and Python. I went from PHP to Perl for non-web-related stuff (I still believe PHP is the best language for web-sites), and have coded many many things in Perl, including networking utilities like DNScan (A DNS subdomain discovery tool, inspired by n3w7yp3 or strayfe's DMap), an image processing framework (Which I basically rewrote to have plugin-functionality, but neglected to svn-commit those changes so it's currently inaccessible on another computer.. ), and countless other scripts.

My most recent language is Python. For the time-being, I can't see myself needing any other languages for most of my coding. I find it very enjoyable to write, and more than fast enough for most projects. 
I've coded lots of small utilities - like a script to open a text file, and add up all the prices in it, or a small logging script to log my laptops CPU temperature once a minute, and another to create a simple graph from that log. Using a small class to create PNG files, it took me about an hour to complete both scripts.
I can do web-coding in it using the web.py framework - it's a very different concept to the PHP way of doing things, but it's so much cleaner (less code, less mess, nice simple templating system to separate the HTML from the code).
I did consider Ruby on Rails, and Django (One Ruby and one Python web-framework), but I found both are very convoluted. An empty site in both is about 50 files spread over several directories, being able to do anything in Django seemed to depend on magically knowing lots of incredibly unintuitive, hackish commands and "shortcut" functions.

But, I digress.. To summarize that slightly tangent-going previous paragraph, I like programming in Python.


Now, what if you combine computers, photography and robotics together? In my case, it's lead me to film and visual effects. As soon as I could leave school (in fact, a few weeks before I think..) I applied for a media-production course at the local college.

My interest in film probably started when my brother and I made a silly short film "I Hate Recorders" - I done some of camera work, some of the editing, and tried out a few ideas for visual-effects shots (Including a Matrix "time-stopped and camera spinning around" shot, and me getting hit in the face with a brick). The effects were created in a combination of Paint Shop Pro 6, AlamDV2 and Chromanator (The latter two are from from http://fxhome.com, PSP6 made by Jasc)
You can see the immaturity on Youtube: http://youtube.com/watch?v=Z32yGkcH_Qo (Most of the humour is of my brothers creation, I had very little to do with the script!.. Proving age isn't a measure of maturity :-P) 

To go of on another tangent - Image editing. Like pretty much every other teenager with a computer, I have a downloaded copy of Photoshop, which I started to use when Paint Shop Pro 6 started to annoy me (It's layering system, and particularly alpha-channel/masking are very limited). Over time I have become very proficient in Photoshop (version 7, then CS2, which I use to this day) - It's also something that lead to my interest in visual effects (Photoshop is considered a very good single-frame compositing application by a lot of people, which is very accurate I'd say). A lot of the images on my Flickr account (http://flickr.com/photos/_dbr/) have been altered to varying degrees in Photoshop. If you can't notice the edits, I'll take that as a compliment.

Back to the media production course: During my time there, I created lots of short videos, and spent a lot of time helping others with iMovie/Final Cut, operating cameras etc.

We started out using iMovie to edit the videos. One of the projects was to create a music video. Trying to time edits to the music was getting very very difficult, as iMovie's timeline is inaccurate. Then I would drag a clip and it would push all the other clips out the way instead of just moving the clip. There was only one video layer. Effects applied very slowly, and you couldn't do anything while they were rendering. To reuse clips, you had to copy/paste them from the timeline..
Basically, it got to the point using iMovie got very limiting and incredibly annoying. 
So I managed to get onto of the Power Mac G5's that were for the second-year students, and started going about teaching myself Final Cut Pro (something that was on the second year's course)
I transfered the iMovie project to the G5, and imported the project into Final Cut Pro 5, and started prodding around. I picked it up quickly - within well, not long, I could help other people with random Final Cut problems! From that point on, I only used iMovie to reencode one or two videos (before I worked out how to better use Final Cut's own rendering system)

Over the rest of the course, and the second year, I used Final Cut more and more, and learned more and more about Final Cut.

About 3/4 of the way though the course, a friend (Craig, or "Razor D") decided to make a feature length film (Rather ambitious), called "Deadly Game 2" (A sequel/spin-off to a short film we made for a college project)

You can see most of our videos on Craig/Razor D's Youtube account: http://youtube.com/user/RAZORD

The film took a lot of effort, Craig done all of the writing (A several hundred page script), casted friends to play parts (and getting said friends to show up at the right times), the directing, and played the lead role. I done nearly all the camera work for it, and started doing the editing - while teaching Craig how to use Final Cut (Something the college lecturers failed to do! His words: "You should be teaching this course!"), by the time we had completed the film (nearly a year and a half later!), he was able to record, capture, edit (and apply effects/transitions etc etc), render and create DVD's. 

We were really happy with how the film turned out.  Sure, the acting was awful, the script was constantly cliched, the editing was rather shoddy in places, as was the camera work (I can be seen in pretty much every pair of reflective sunglasses in the film, and the script can be see on the floor several times..)

I learned a huge amount thought the creation of the film - I'd almost consider the film itself arbitrary - the process of creating it was more important than the result. That said, the film is in the "so bad it's good" area, one of the favorite "genres" of film (if you can call it that) - The film is very funny, just not intentionally like a comedy film would be (There are no jokes as such, just corny lines, ridiculous plot-lines and terrible acting).

In the film, there were a few visual effects - a few "rings of fire", portraying interdimensional portals to the underworld (See what I mean about "ridiculous plot-lines"?), and a cut-a-body-in-half shot which I added in some blood/guts (done in Shake)

About a month after I finished the two year course, I applied for a working holiday Visa, and was on a plane to Australia (where my sister and nephew emigrated a few years ago), and that's where I currently am (Until July 2008).
I suppose I should have mentioned before this point, but I was born in Scotland about 18 years ago, and lived in a small village about 50 miles from Edinburgh. I am currently living in Adelaide, South Australia for a year.

While I was in Australia, I started looking around for visual effects companies (well, I had looked before I left for Australia), and arranged a meeting with Adelaide/Syndey based Rising Sun Pictures (RSP - http://rsp.com.au), with whom I arranged a meeting, and showed them some of my previous work (Mostly a few experiments in Shake, the cut-in-half shot from Deadly Game 2, and some of my photos) - on the basis of that, the offered me a place on an intermediate Shake training course, run by one of their compositors. I really enjoyed the course, and I hope to be given the opportunity to work for RSP as a trainee-compositor in January.

I found visual effects to be a near-perfect blend of everything I enjoy doing. It's basically technical artistry - programming plus photography. I can't think of a better job than two of my biggest hobbies combined.

So, that's me - dbr!

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Me on the Internet(s)

As for the nick "dbr", I'm often asked what it means. And to be honest, it means nothing! I think I originally came up with the letters as an abbreviation for "Death by Robot" as a name for one of the robots I made. So I suppose that is what it means still - but I don't really consider it to stand for anything these days.
I used a few variations on of "dbr". I used to use "teamdbr" for robotics related stuff. Since it wasn't so much of as a team as it was just me, I eventually changed it to dbr_onix (Nothing to do with some Pokemon character-thingy as was pointed out to me a long time after I started using the nick.. it was going to be dbr_oynx, but "oynx" seemed to be more used than "onix", according to Google at the time.. And I prefer the look on the the characters in "onix").. I used that nick for various sites/logins for a while.
Now, I use the nick "dbr", and when that is two short (or already registered, as it's a short nick), I use "mr_dbr"

Internet Reading's

On the subject on the internet - I regularly read various sites/"blogs":
- The fairly-famous "social bookmarking" site Digg (http://digg.com), which has gone down-hill since they added the non-technology sections, started adding ridiculous amounts of Javascript (to the point where each page freezes the browser for a few seconds), and the horrible-to-read "threaded" comment system

- More recently I've started reading the site Reddit (http://reddit.com). I find it more "mature" than Digg - much more intelligent, eloquent and interesting comments, with "proper" discussions, rather than a race to post funny "internet memes" as on Digg.

As for blog sites (I don't like the world "blog", but that's another matter) I read. Well, I use Googles RSS reader ("Google Reader") extensively: I have over 300 RSS feeds I read, I'm not going to list them all here, because this profile thingy is already too long, but I'll list a few that spring to mind.. Okay so this list is a little longer than I intended as I cheated and went though my RSS reader's feed list, I didn't pull all these URL's from memory sadly :


Linux related feeds:
- Command Line Warriors ( http://commandline.org.uk/ ): Varying computer-related articles, leaning towards Linux. Some rant'y ones, some programming related stuff.
- Debian Package of the Day (http://debaday.debian.net/feed/atom/): As the name suggests, it suggests interesting applications avaiable in Debians repositories. I've found a few useful applications from it - they are struggling to get enough articles to publish one a week, never-mind one a day. I've considered writing some articles for them, but never got around to it..
- HowToForge (http://www.howtoforge.com): The feed itself isn't so useful, but the site is full of very useful and complete tutorials on setting up various servers/applications (again aimed at Linux/BSD based servers, but a lot are OS-agnostic). It's been a good reference when I've had trouble setting up various stuff (most recently, a webDAV server - I couldn't get authenticiation to work properly, after skimming though the HowToForge tutorial, I found what I was neglecting to setup, the webdav-lock-file).
- NixCraft (http://www.cyberciti.biz/): Lots of tips/tutorials - I've fixed lots of silly little problems I've been having based of tips on this site.

OS X related feeds:
- Cocia Blog (http://blog.cocoia.com): The writer (Sebastiaan) isn't the most modest person every born, and as such his writings can be a little arrogant at times, but there are some interesting stuff in the feed. It's a blog of a icon designer - I've put this under the OS X header since most of the icons are for OS X applications, and most of the articles are related to the OS in some way..
- Macenstein (http://macenstein.com/): Generally has decent views on Apple's stuff, less "reporting for the sake of reporting", more "reporting because we use Apple's stuff and have an opinion about something relating to them"
- MacOSXHints (http://www.macosxhints.com): This site has made OS X much much more usable for me, there's solutions to pretty much every Mac OS X problem/annoyance I've had on this site.
- Tao Of Mac (http://the.taoofmac.com): I really like this site - The author is very sensible, and managers to write about Apple's stuff without any trace of the annoying "fanboyism" a lot of Apple/OS X related blogs have. Also lists a lot of decent/usful software, and he as written a several useful Python scripts/classes I use (The PNG creation class I mentioned previously, for example)
- The Unofficial Apple Weblog (http://tuaw.com): Apple related news, the rumours and such that creep into the feed sometimes get a bit annoying, as to the constant new-Apple-product related posts, but it often lists useful software/tips.

Web comics:
- XKCD (http://www.xkcd.com): By far my favorite web-comic ever. It's.. great, and that's about the best way I can describe it. Unique and unmatchable if I want to try harder to explain it's greatness. Very geeky if I want to describe it to someone who doesn't know what a [complicated sounding computer item] is.
- XKCD/Blag (http://blag.xkcd.com/feed/): the blag of the XKCD author. Lots of amusing stuff, like the author filling him house with those childrens-ball-pit-balls (and why not)
- Ctrl+Alt+Del (http://www.cad-comic.com): Comic about an obsessive gamer, by an obsessive gamer. Amusing, and very well drawn.
- Note to Self (http://www.hoodyhoo.com/): Not very often updated, but generally fairly decent.
- Explosm (http://explosm.net): Incredibly un-politically-correct, funny, but is a little repetitive at times

Comptuer'y stuff:
- GeekTechnique (http://geektechnique.org): One of my favorite blogs, written by someone rather obsessed by Sun/SGI hardware and OpenBSD, who has an shiney computer setup, and a nice writing style.
- Lifehacker (http://lifehacker.com): Sometimes the "GTD" ("Getting Things Done") fad obsession is a little annoying, but there are often useful tips (both computer and home-related stuff), and useful applications and services.
- WorseThanFailure (http://thedailywtf.com): Stories about programming failures, amusing and worrying at the same time.
- Uncov (http://www.uncov.com): Reviews of "Web 2.0" sites - mostly hilighting how utterly pointless most of them are.. Funnily written most of the time.
- Hackaday (http://www.hackaday.com): Modifications of.. everything vaguely computer-related. Some very interesting ideas.

Piracy-related stuff:
- RlsLog (http://www.rlslog.net/): Err, reviews of newly pirated films/TV/games/software.. Not particularly legal, but useful if you are interested in such things.
- ThePirateBay (http://thepiratebay.org): The biggest and most (im)famous Torrent site, has a sometimes-interesting blog (although it's not updated very often)

Visual effects related stuff:
- FXGuide (http://www.fxguide.com): Very interesting site, has interviews with visual effects supervisors/compositors, lots of articles on how various film-effects are made, and VFX-industry news. Regularely updated, very-professionally done. The FXGuide podcast, and FXGuideTV, their video-podcast are also very well made.
- Prolost (http://prolost.blogspot.com): Blog of a colour-corrector, often has very interesting articles on an interesting subject.
- VideoCopilot (http://www.videocopilot.net): A large range of After Effects tutorials - even though I'm not hugely interested in After Effects, I find these tutorials very good.

Music:
- http://www.radiohead.com and http://www.65daysofstatic.com : The blogs of two of my favourite bands of all time, Radiohead and 65daysofstatic.
- Last.fm (http://blog.last.fm): I like the company behind the site, and the site itself, often has interesting insights into the site and said company (I'm using the adjective "interesting" too often)

Programming related:
- Coding Horror (http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/): The author is extremely intelligent and insightful. Consistently well written and clever articles.

Security related:
- Schneier on Security (http://www.schneier.com/blog/): Extremely intelligent author, some very insightful posts.
- Irongeek (http://www.irongeek.com): Not very updated very often, but the site has some interesting "hacking" stuff, the video tutorials are decent.