Home : About : About Mackenga
I am Mackenga, also known as Geoff Mackenzie. I am a Software Developer based in Glasgow. For the past few years, I've been working for a national manufacturing company, maintaining and developing a variety of internal information systems, with most of my work contributing to SCADA systems running on Microsoft Windows XP. Up until the end of 2009, most of my development work was in Visual Basic 6 and Transact-SQL for Microsoft SQL Server 2000, but although I'll still be involved in maintenance and support for these legacy systems for a while, my focus is now shifting to the new generation systems, based on .NET, which are replacing them.
I've also developed scripts and services using a variety of technologies, including .NET, the Windows Script Host (both VBScript and JScript), Tcl/Tk and Python (the latter two, unfortunately, to a lesser extent than the others). I've used DTS, and I've been through an introductory development course on SSIS, though I've not used that practically yet.
When I'm free to choose my tools, my preferred development platform is GNU/Linux. I've a preference for Debian and Ubuntu but I've spent some time with other distributions, including Slackware, Red Hat, Fedora, SuSE (some time ago, pre-Novell's involvement) and Scientific Linux.
On GNU/Linux, I mostly use Tcl/Tk and Python (more the latter than the former these days), but occasionally resort to C for performance-critical work. My prefered RDBMS is Postgres, but I do use and like MySQL as well.
I'm happy with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, and have written Common Gateway Interface applications in C, Perl and Tcl. I have programmed using Berkeley sockets, ncurses and POSIX Threads amongst others.
Recently I've started learning to use CUDA and OpenCL, having developed a need for fast, massively parallel floating point crunching for the Lereco project. Also mostly for Lereco, but also partly for EID, I've started learning about electronics and interfacing.
My few waking hours not spent staring at glowing rectangles are usually spent playing the bass or guitar or tinkering with my vehicles.
Unfortunately, I can only apologise for the continued absence of a convenient contact mechanism; I'm going to assume that if you want to get in touch, you can figure out my email address from the domain name and the username I used to introduce myself at the start of the first paragraph. Apologies in advance for my inordinate delay in responding; I don't check my mail nearly often enough.