This home page is not updated on a regular basis. My current home page is here.

I attended University of Wales, Swansea (or The University College of Swansea as it was known then) from October 1992 to June 1996 studying Electronic Engineering with Communications. I was the Secretary of the Computer Society from September 1993 until June 1996. By virtue of my previous office, I am now a life member of the society. Since this time I have attended Cambridge University (Trinity College) where I studied Error Resilient Image Compression in the Signal Processing Group of the Engineering Department from October 1996 to November 2000. I now run my own company, ChyGwyn Limited.

Over the years I've donated a few bits of hardware to the computer society and still occasionally drop things off when I pass through Swansea. I'm still in touch with a number of other ex-Swansea graduates from time to time and I tend to visit Swansea a few times each year. One reason is always the annual Computer Society beach party held every year in Swansea Bay usually a short distance (well there is a limit to how far we want to carry the firewood!) from the small car park opposite Singleton Park.

Another activity which I used to be involved in was helping out running the RAG/AU Midsummer Balls doing a communications job, often as the runner to find people who couldn't hear their radios over the noise of the ball and to tap them on the shoulder. It was generally thought by those running the ball that they had more fun than those attending (and then there was the ball crew party with free drinks....).

I was also involved in the Electronic Engineering Amateur Radio Society (GW3UWS or should that be GC3UWS now?) which was based in the radio shack in the Faraday building. This was never an official Student Union society due to the small numbers of people involved which never met the minimum numbers for their rules. At one stage a lot of the development of the Linux AX.25 stack for packet radio was being developed at Swansea by the radio society but this died out and is now maintained by others. If you look through the Linux AX.25 code though you'll see some mention of GW7RRM (my callsign) and also GW4PTS (Alan Cox - the original author of the AX.25 code). I'm not sure if the packet station is still going, but at one stage it was famous as a wormhole due to our experiments with IP tunnelling and the wormhole system. I was quite surprised to arrive in Cambridge and discover that the amateur radio society there (the University Wireless Society) knew all about our experiments!

Further experiments with Linux led to the writing of the DECnet stack which has been through many changes and rewrites but finally resulted in the code which is in the Linux 2.4 kernel. If you want to know more about the DECnet layer in Linux, follow this link. I also write other patches for the Linux kernel from time to time and you can find more details here.