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Peter
D. Blackburn
(Zebedee to his friends) was born in the North of England in 1967, and lives in
the center of Huntingdon in England - in fact the same town where Oliver
Cromwell was born. He is looked after by his (IT contracting) wife Ildikó, as he
forgets to feed himself when left to his own devices. It took just a little
over 11 years for him to boot up, but since 1979 he has been more or less
continually connected as a peripheral coding device to one computer system or
another, becoming strangely agitated and irritable if deprived of his coding fix
for more than a few hours at a time.
He left secondary school in 1985 before completing his A' Levels (roughly
equivalent to US High School Graduation) in order to teach himself his A'
Levels and his Entrance Examinations for Cambridge University, (also to find
time to run a small publishing company, and program) Once at Cambridge
University he (occasionally - oops!) studied Computer Science at St Catharine's
College and graduated in 1989. (those who knew him well at the time knew that
his attentions might have been a little more focused towards his publishing
activities.).
Over the last 13 years, since graduating from Cambridge he has contracted his
services to corporates, local government, and other development teams working as
Lead Consultant Project Developer on many large database developments. He enjoys
to receive the mantle of a challenge and gets called upon to parachute into a
number of wayward developments to turn them around. His knowledge of Client
Server databases extends to building his own Client Server databases (in the
early 90s) from the ground upwards - creating travel reservation databases
operating under Unix programmed in C, utilising D-ISAM libraries and these
custom built systems were capable of maintaining 200+ connected sessions on
minimal hardware through TCP/IP streams, and X25 networks - a very good
grounding indeed to get an in depth instinctive idea of the issues and design
decisions that face the vendors of today's Client Server DBMSes.
At the moment his burning passion is for disconnected distributed databases
utilizing various smart devices.
In addition to being the CEO of Boost Data Ltd (www.boost.net), CTO of
International Network Technologies Organization Ltd, and obvious involvement
with Peter Blackburn Ltd, he is an Editorial Director of Apress, with authoring,
book commissioning responsibilities, and a special responsibility towards
Quality Control of all Apress' products.
When contracting on client sites he often wears, a bowtie (with teddy bears on
it) waistcoat and suspenders (For the UK readers "suspenders" are what Americans
call "braces" whereas "suspenders" in the UK are called "garter belts" in
America - He's very quick to add he doesn't wear "garter belts"!)
You can visit his Web site at www.boost.net
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