About Me - My Work

In my spare time, I maintain or have worked on a number of web sites, and contributed to a number of open source projects:

Web sites

• owenrudge.net
  My main web site, which you're reading right now! Started in 1999 as "Owen's Visual Basic Workshop", this site has been my outlet on the web for nearly 10 years.
  
  
• Owen's Transport Tycoon Station
  Originally part of owenrudge.net, my Transport Tycoon site is now separate and provides advice, hints, utilities, and saved games/scenarios for Chris Sawyer's popular Transport Tycoon games.
  
  
• The Transport Tycoon Forums
  The discussion forums for Transport Tycoon. An active community with nearly 800,000 posts and 20,000 users as of July 2009.
  
  
• Zernebok Hosting
  I own and operate a small web host called Zernebok Hosting, offering affordable shared, reseller and VPS hosting. The site was redesigned recently with the site you see today.
  
  
• The Ultimate Transport Tycoon Game Repository
  A site with hundreds of Transport Tycoon saved games and scenarios available for download. Sadly, somewhat neglected. I've intended to replace this with a much nicer version two, which is progressing nicely and should hopefully be released by the end of the year.
  
  
• The Melissa Zone
  What was intended to be the ultimate Melissa Joan Hart fan site! A new, dynamic site about Melissa Joan Hart, with a very nice design. Unfortunately, I never really had the time to get it completely finished. The server the site was on died a couple of years ago, but relatively recently I uploaded an old backup (for historial/archival purposes if nothing else).
  
  
• GnutellaWorld
  I did extensive work on the old version of GnutellaWorld, a network of sites about the Gnutella peer-to-peer file sharing network. However, this site was replaced with a new version in Autumn 2001, which I have had no influence over. Visit The Internet Archive and type in http://www.gnutellaworld.net/ to see what the site looked like before (around July 2001).
  
  
• MP3Violation.com
  I coded most of MP3Violation.com and was an administrator on the site, where you could trade interesting and funny MP3s with other users, plus rate and comment on them. Also includes forums where you can discuss just about anything with other visitors to the site. Alas, this site was on the same server as The Melissa Zone, and is also no more.
  
  
• Useless Fact Of The Day
  I converted the Useless Fact Of The Day web site from an ASP back-end to PHP in May 2002. I have since rewritten the entire site, improving the coding significantly. Administration of Useless Fact of the Day is now much easier, which means the quiz, fact of the day and so on are easier to maintain. A great site, full of useless facts! The new owner of the site, however, has unfortunately neglected the site recently, and it is not currently accessible.
  
  
• Golf.UK.Net
  The ultimate UK golf resource site on the Internet. I wrote the vast majority of the site, including the core search and listing routines, a dynamic content management system, a newsletter system with a forum-like code for easy access to HTML tag replacements, plus a highly comprehensive administrative interface for total control of the site with ease.
  
  
• Boballie.com
  I did some coding for Boballie.com some years ago, a site mainly about the game RollerCoaster Tycoon by Chris Sawyer.
  
  
• PCFusion
  I did the original coding on PCFusion, a web site dedicated to PC gaming. The work included a sophisticated template system, a web-based content management system, full integration with the forum system (the site was originally created as a generic set of scripts known as GameSite). PCFusion was since abandoned/cancelled by its owner.

Open Source projects

• OpenTTD
  I was one of the original developers of OpenTTD, coordinating the original release in 2005 and providing web hosting and assorted patches to the project over the years.
  
  
• Wine
  My Google Summer of Code 2008 project involves working on Wine to implement better support for Windows control panels, and to improve Wine's configuration utilities by developing new control panels. I've since continued contributing patches to Wine as and when possible, and shall be working full-time on Wine from August 2009 onwards.
  
  
• FreeDOS
  I have contributed a few patches and utilities to FreeDOS since 2000, including enhancing COMMAND.COM's history features.
  
  
• FreeGEM
  I have my own distribution of GEM, a graphical user interface for DOS, dating back to the year 2000, and maintained FreeGEM Output, the GEMP3 MP3 player, and assorted other utilities.
  
  
• The SEAL project
  I became the maintainer of SEAL, another GUI for DOS, in February 2002, and had control over the web site, among other things. I moved everything to a central repository at SourceForge, and totally rewrote the web site. Due to other commitments, I no longer maintain the site, but am still an administrator on it.
  
  
• OSPlus
  The Open Source home for OSPlus, a collection of utilities I created in 2000 and have continued to develop under the GNU General Public Licence.

I have also done various bits of work for other sites and projects not listed here. If you're interested in any of my projects, please get in touch.

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