Bradford Robotic Telescope
Designed and developed systems for the Bradford Robotic Telescope including creation of the Web interface to the telescope as well as many network, system programs, database systems, ISDN PPP networking, large scale user authentication system and autonomous house-keeping and security systems (Perl, C, Assembler).I started working with John Baruch on the Bradford Robotic Telescope after finishing my Degree in 1992.
My first attempts at Internet control of the telescope were in March 1993 when I started a gopher server. Interaction with users via gopher was fairly limited and by early 1994 we'd completed switched over to using the World-Wide Web. Using the Web for interaction in 1994 was frustrating and I created many patches to NCSA httpd to deal with several security issues I found and extra functionality such as large scale authentication. It was hard to get browsers to work properly, and we had to rely on users using Mozilla 0.6 as it was the only browser that was able to POST to an authenticated area. At the end of 1994 we gained a lot of press interest and was featured in a segment on the Australian show "Beyond 2000".
I left the University of Bradford (and my nearing-completion PhD) in 1995.
Random photos:
Created: 12 Aug 2009
