Also on twitter but nicknames get taken, so as schmerg (this blog can also be reached as www.schmerg.com of course).

Quite some time ago I wrote HttpSniffer.pl (if that's what you've come looking for) - a perl script that acted as a proxy and so helped you trace and debug HTTP conversations between clients and servers. I still have it somewhere, but there are many better ways to do this these days (amusingly some of the more modern tools nicked the name).

I've worked for a variety of places, big and small, designing and writing software that people have found useful - some has been used to solve crimes and catch murderers (and worse), and an electronic marketplace system I designed securely executed multi-party public transactions with a notional value of $50 trillion (yes, that's not a typo) in the first 18 months of operation.

But mostly I work with software people to make them more effective than they've been before, usually by having more fun working on the real job of software, satisfying the real customer with what they truly want to get done. Sounds a bit aspirational corporate mumbo-jumbo written like that, but if you've ever worked with me you'll know what I mean...

These days I'm working on my startup, mysparebrain - a new service that helps you keep track of all that stuff that doesn't quite fit in your current brain. It's exciting, it's new, it's sort of what people always expected computers to do for them, but it's also quite unlike anything you've seen before.