Simon

About

Simon is a thirty-something researcher in the Evolutionary Biology Group, which is in the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Reading. He is currently researching the factors that influence the rates at which languages evolve. The work will include collecting data on phonemes in different languages and then help to develop a statistical model to describe how phoneme-use evolves across sets of related languages.

Simon has been a researcher in the Boundary Layer Meteorology group in the Department of Meteorology, at the University of Reading. His research was into Modelling Winds and Dispersion in Urban Areas

Prior to this, Simon completed a Ph.D. as a member of the Centre for Advanced Computing and Emerging Technologies, in the School of Systems Engineering, at the University of Reading, where he researched hybrid Monte Carlo methods for matrix computations.

Interests

Orienteering and Running

Simon, as a member of Wimborne Orienteers, is often to be found in a forest, on a moor, or in a town, running with a map and compass. In 2002, he achieved the Instructor coaching award from British Orienteering and renewed this, in August 2005, as a Level 2 coaching qualification. In 2007, Simon achieved a British Red Cross Emergency Life Support qualification. He has planned an event for the Dorset Schools League and is regularly involved with the organisation and computing at orienteering events.

Since 2006 Simon has been blogging about the orienteering and running events he has attended. In 2009 he attended 39 events; in 2008 he attended 38 events; in 2007 he attended 40 events; in 2006 he attended 28 events; and you can follow his progress in 2010.

Reading

For the last few years Simon has been trying to read a book a week – i.e. 52 books in 52 weeks. For this he only counts the books he reads for the first time – i.e. not counting any books he rereads. In 2009 he read 105 books; in 2008 he read 83 books; in 2007 he read 54 books; in 2006 he read 54 books; in 2005 he read 41 books; and you can follow his progress in 2010.

Computing

Computers form an important part of Simon’s life. His research and work involve the using computers for many different purposes. Simon’s websites and web projects gives an overview of some of the websites and web projects that Simon has contributed to.

Operating Systems

For the early portion of his online time Simon was using Microsoft operating systems. He has experience of using and administrating all version of Windows. More recently he has moved to Linux, which he prefers.

Over his time on Linux, Simon has used Redhat, SUSE, Fedora, and Debian. For now he has settled on Kubuntu, which he finds has the right balance of ease of setup, ease of use, and flexibility to provide a good working environment for his day to day computing requirements.

Programming Languages

For his research Simon uses C and C++. These languages are ideally suited for the mathematical computations involved in the modelling. The growing importance of large systems means that Simon uses PVM, MPI, and OpenMP to produce code which works efficiently on large computer systems.

Over the years Simon has also built up an extensive knowledge of web development. He has experience of PHP, Perl, Ruby, Rails, Javascript, HTML, CSS, and SQL. Recently he has preferred to use Ruby on Rails to develop sites. Simon’s websites and web projects gives a portfolio of some of Simon’s work.

Important in using all of these languages has also been learning to effectively use the available support tools for programming. Such tools as Git, Subversion, Trac, Bugzilla, and many others.

Software

The software Simon uses each day is quite limited. For his web browsing he uses Firefox. For writing code Simon mainly uses Vim. When writing documents in LaTeX Simon finds Kile provides all the tools needed.

The Photos

At various orienteering events Chris and Simon Branford take photographs. These are available at Simon’s account on flickr.com. A random selection appears at the top of the column on the right. If you have any comments or queries concerning these photographs please contact Simon.