My name is John Kemp and I am currently a Research Assistant with the Cogent Computing Applied Research Centre at Coventry University in England. Details of my research can be found on the aptly named Research page.
My Interests
A large portion of my interests involve coding and electronics, either based on fun things I've come across during my research or just things that caught my attention in general.
One thing that I seem to keep coming back to is coding for portable games consoles and devices such as the GBA, PSP, NDS, and the Nokia N95 (running Symbian S60 3rd Edition). Most of my coding work is aimed at the PC platform of course, and almost exclusively Linux, though as my favourite language is Python most of my software will also work under Windows. For those that are interested in such things, my favourite terminal based text editors are nano and emacs (depending on whether I'm making a simple change or something more involved).
Recently I've been touching on the web development side of things a bit more. It is something I've never been very good at so it seemed like a good idea to find some frameworks that I could learn to use to make life easier. This led me to Django and Drupal. Django is very useful for providing a web based front-end for a system such as a sensor network as the combination of its framework and the use of Python greatly simplifies things such as database access, displaying graphs, and packaging data for download. I implemented a large portion of an Urban Dead clone in Django and found it to be very smooth to work on. Drupal is, of course, the CMS I used for this edition of my website and it has been very nice to work with so far, with modules for almost anything you can think of (and a lot of things you can't).
Most recently I have started becoming interested in using embedded devices as a hobbyist, and am in the process of obtaining development boards for several different microcontrollers. Watch out for related updates on the site.