Cirruculum Vitae for Trevor Johnston

Contents

School Results

Leaving Certificate, 2000:

EnglishHA2
MathsHB1
PhysicsHB2
ChemistryHB3
GeographyHC1
FrenchHC2
IrishOB1

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College Results

First YearFirst class honours (1.1)
Second YearFirst class honours (1.1)
Third YearFirst class honours (1.1)

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Previous Work Experience

June - September 2003:
IBM "Extreme Blue" Internship, Dublin
I was part of the first of IBM's "Extreme Blue" internship programmes to be held in Ireland. These internships are held all over the world to help attract the best IT graduates to IBM. I worked in a team prototyping new functionality for one of the Lotus brand's collaboration products. The prototype was very favourably received by both IBM executives and external customers at both home and abroad and it is planned for the feature to be incorporated into an upcoming version of the software.
May - June 2003:
Summer Internship, DCU School of Computer Applications
I implemented a Java Server Pages filter which provides a simple (but complete) discussion board to any HTML page. The lecturer can create a "questions and answers" forum on a particular topic within a course simply by adding a custom HTML tag to the page. Provision is made for removing certain answers and for authentication (via another filter, part of my previous summer's work).
June - July 2002:
Summer Internship, DCU School of Computer Applications
Built a web-based progress feedback system for first year students in DCU's Computer Applications programme. Lab tutors (typically second years) fill in a short form outlining of their students' progress in the lab enabling the lecturer give individual attention to those students even though there may be 150 in the class.
November 2001 - Present:
System Administration, St. Oliver's Community College, Drogheda
This school provides individual email addresses, web access, personal storage space and 24/7 Internet access to 1200 users (both students and staff). In 2001 I setup a roomful of workstations running Linux along with the K Desktop Environment (KDE) and Sun's StarOffice suite, the first of its kind in a school in Ireland. Over the summer of 2002 I setup (along with my colleagues) a room of 30 thin-client (aka "X terminal") Linux workstations. I am also jointly responsible for the well-being of the file, email and web server.
1999 - 2001:
Websites for Local Companies
I have produced websites for some local companies. The first was for JF Farm machines, in conjunction with a former schoolmate of mine, at http://homepage.eircom.net/~jffarm. I later was hired by another local farm machinery company to make their website; this has since been replaced with another site.

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Areas of Experience

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Hobbies and Interests

My main hobby is music. I've played cornet with the Drogheda Brass Band since 1993 and served on committee for two years. Between 1998 and 2001 I played with "Irish Youth Brass", a national brass band for young people. I play with the Cross Border Orchestra of Ireland, a non-profit organisation aiming to increase understanding between Catholic and Protestant young people in the border region of Ireland. I played with them in The Helix in May 2003 and will travel with them to California in February 2004 for a series of concerts.

I twice entered the Irish Science Olympiad (IOI). First time I was chosen as a substitute for the team who progress to the international competition and the second time I was placed 7th overall and received a silver medal. Today, I help organise the computer programming section of the IOI by setting problems and judging at the competition. In 2002 the Irish team received a bronze medal at the International Olympiad in Informatics in South Korea. In 2003 I was appointed deputy team leader for the Irish team but was unable to travel to Wisconsin, USA, due to work commitments.

In 2000 I was part of a team representing DCU in the IBM International Programming Competition, North-Western Europe Round, in Darmstadt, Germany.

I have a long-time interest in computer programming. This started with a ZX Spectrum, spread to the Commodore Amiga and finally reached the IBM PC. I have a particular interest in games programming; my current project is a massively-multiplayer online realtime strategy game written in C++ under GNU/Linux and following a client/server model and (eventually) featuring OpenGL graphics.

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Additional Information

From December 2002 to June 2003 I served as secretary for the DCU Networking Society (aka. "RedBrick"). With over 1000 members it is the second largest society in the college. We presented talks by noted cyberneticist Professor Kevin Warwick (broadcast live on the web), senior security consultant at Sun Microsystems, Mr. Lance Spitzner and Mr. Jon "Mad Dog" Hall. Also, in a massive development for the society, we procured a room from the college to hold our equipment and purchased a new Dell Poweredge server.

Won "Best Use of Information Technology" at the 2000 Young Scientist and Technology Exhibition for a team project entitled "AI: Future or Fable?". I wrote some software to investigate basic machine learning (later discovering it had some ideas in common with genetic algorithms). It was a bizarre setup, with the AI code written in C++ and the display written in Blitz Basic, running under a Commodore Amiga emulator on a Linux machine. Probably most notable technically about the software is that it has never crashed (even in front of judges). We had articles published in The Irish Times, Linux Format (issue #1), the Irish Scientist Yearbook 2000 and the Irish Linux User's Group website. These articles were drafted by a teammate and then expanded, tidied up and submitted by myself.

At home we run a small garden centre. I would like this to expand so for my third year project for college I wrote a "Garden Centre System" to automate and assist with some of the day-to-day running of the centre. It consists of a multi-threaded C++ Unix server which controls all the parts of the system along with several GUI applications (written in Java) to interface with the server. The system is in an early stage but the basic architecture is complete.

I completed grade 5 standard in electronic organ from the London School of Music and grade 6 standard in cornet from the London Guildhall School of Music.

In sixth year I taught the basics of the C programming language to other students. The aim was to help prepare those intending to study computers at third level education.

I have passed 5 of 7 of the required modules for the European Computer Driving Licence.

At St. Oliver's I was on the 1997/1998 and 1998/1999 College Yearbook committee. I was class student of the year in both 1996/1997 and 1997/1998. I received a "Best Junior Cert Results" award in 1997. I was computer student of the year in 1998 and 2000.

In Transition Year I held an interview with the CEO of Amiga International, Mr. Petro Tyschtschenko, for my mini-company project.

Vice-captain of the winning team in the 1999/2000 Coca-Cola Atlantic Schools Quiz, which is held each year for secondary schools in Louth, Meath and Cavan.

Holder of the grade of honorary yellow belt in the arts of self-defence and jiu-jitsu from the World Kobudo Federation. I try to find time to practice Aikido while in college.

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