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| About Me/Contact Me |
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| Press the Play button for some soothing music | ||||||||||||||
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*
About me and my dogs! * |
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| In many emails and conversations, I frequently get asked quite a few questions about who I am, what I do, why I do it and so forth. Quite why people want to know is beyond me, but anyway here are some of the FAQ. | ||||||||||||||
| Where did the original BLScan program come from? | ||||||||||||||
| I wrote it for my own use. I actually started out by trying to read a blacklist file into Excel to do sorting and searching using macros. But this was more complicated that it first appeared and things rapidly got into such a mess that I thought it would be quicker to write a purpose built program, from that came BLScan. I have been using BLScan and more recently BLScanPlus for my own blacklist management since May 2004 and think I have shaken out any bugs. If you have problems, let me know. | ||||||||||||||
| And the other BLScan related utilities? | ||||||||||||||
| Basically features I identified that Mailwasher did not support. Having written a library of base code, it was not as much work to create the other utilities. | ||||||||||||||
| How long has BLScan been around? | ||||||||||||||
| I wrote the first version in May 2004, but then developed it
further during June and early July to add more elaborate functions and
features. I
decided to let everyone
know about BLScan since it may help a lot of people. I later introduced BLComp and more recently BLConv. If users think these utilities are good tools, then I may
develop them
further, add some new functions etc. If however users think they are of
no use to them, then they can easily remove them from their computer. I
am very pleased with the feedback
I have received, which has been very good. Thank you all for your
very kind comments, getting these comments makes it all
feel worthwhile. |
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| How successful are your BLScan related programs? | ||||||||||||||
| I have had
no complaints to date. You can see some testimonials.
This site receives thousands of visitors every month, a percentage of those visitors become users. I do not know how many users are out there since I do not record any details or statistics on user numbers or even downloads (in respecting this sites privacy policy and also the absence of any means of measurement with the software being available as a free download). I get a huge amount of email from users, the majority being thank you emails, a significant amount are questions and quite a few requests for other utilities/suggestions. |
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| Why did you produce MultiSub and
MultiWord? |
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| As a
web designer myself, I
was amazed to find that nobody offered the functionality
available within MultiSub. So with a few weeks (well months actually)
of coding, I produced MultiSub. I made this available for nothing since
it seems like one of the basic tools that everybody should have access
to. MultiWord followed later and was a user request. Similar tools sell for 'silly money', so it was not that difficult to produce my own version which, if you excuse a little arrogance, I think is better than other products I have seen. |
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Why is
your domain called
Dogsbyte?  |
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| No reason, just a fun name and because I am a dog lover. I have two dogs of my own (that don't bite) and if I get reincarnated, I'd quite like to be a dog! Here are some pictures of my dogs, cute eh? | ||||||||||||||
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| What do you get out of doing this? | ||||||||||||||
| I work on software in my spare time for enjoyment. As I mentioned before, I originally wrote most of my software tools for my own use and later decided to them available to everybody else, initially thinking that 'one or two' people may find them useful! | ||||||||||||||
| Do you make a lot of
money out of this? |
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| I
wish!, but no,
I actually make a loss out of it, but then again I never intended to
make
anything from it. I'd just like to break even (but I'm not even doing
that right now). This software is developed and funded at my expense, the only income is from very kind donations from users. So in return for the software, users are requested to donate some loose change. This site (dogsbyte.com) is very non-profit making but does however need to operate at break even. Income from donations is only used to help pay the site/software/support overheads. |
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| Do you write software
for a living? |
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| No,
although if I could make a living from writing software for the public
I would love to do that. The main problem with a career in software is
that the opportunities to work on new/original products are actually
quite low. A huge amount of software work is to support and maintain
legacy systems written by other people a long time ago. Much of this
software is never seen by the general public. I am certainly not a software expert, but most of my career to date has been spent in the area of IT and Computer Aided Design (CAD). I have worked with all manner of CAD systems and done some development, a lot of support, applications integration, training etc. I have written many programs in many different languages. I am a proponent of making software accessible to the masses, by this I am not referring to an issue of improving availability, I refer to making complicated software usable by people with limited experience. |
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| Are you qualified? |
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| Yes.
I have a variety of qualifications from Microsoft, CompTIA, and CIW. I
have specific certifications in the area of security, hence my interest
in anti-spam strategies. |
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| Where are you from? | ||||||||||||||
| I am from Southampton, which is a port in the central south of England in the county of Hampshire. It's where the Titanic sailed from, where the Spitfire was designed/built, where Craig David comes from and was also the home town of Benny Hill! The county of Hampshire also encompasses the beautiful New Forest. Here is a guide to Southampton and Hampshire and some history of Southampton. | ||||||||||||||
| Any tips? |
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| Not
really, but just for fun here are a few of my favourite things. |
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| What if I have ideas or
suggestions? |
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| If
you would like to see any of the utilities enhanced with a specific
change or a new feature, you are very welcome to contact me. I cannot
guarantee to do what you request, but I have a very good record of
implementing user requested features. |
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| Are you working on
anything new right now? |
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| I
have just finished MultiWord. I have
another program in the pipe, which is a desktop security tool that
everybody will hopefully find very useful. I am in the process of
testing this at present, so stop by soon. This is most likely to be
freeware, but it depends on how much I have to spend to finish it. |
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| How do I contact you? |
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| See below... |
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* Contact me * |
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For
feedback, questions or to report problems contact
me Any contact details supplied to me will not be passed onto third parties. Apart from responses to enquiries, no emails are sent to users past or present relating to this package. Any unexpected communications from this domain are thus likely to be spammers sending illegitimate email using a forged header, so feel free to blacklist this domain. |
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| Alternatively, you can
contact me using the Private Message function at the Mailwasher forums
at forum.firetrust.com,
my username is Toucan |
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