About Me

Tom Wallace

I got my start in web development initially as a site builder utilizing XHTML, CSS and JavaScript. I excelled at taking designers PSD files and creating valid XHTML from it and ensuring that it looks correct in a wide variety of browsers. I wanted to expand my skill set, so I took up C# and SQL Server about 6 years ago and have been mostly focusing on those ever since. Web forms interacting with databases through stored procedures, outputting data into fully interactive listviews, datagrids, repeaters, etc., is a main focus of mine. I've also dabbled in Flash, Flex and Silverlight, though among those, Flex is the only one I really enjoy.

In the last year I've gotten into MVC via .NET using Visual Studio. I'm also very interested in jQuery, CSS 3, HTML 5 and responsive web design. I dislike building separate websites for different devices as I think that using responsive design to build one site for all devices is the way of the future.

My interests outside of web development include my two dogs (Chow Chow/Shar Pei mixes we rescued in May 2012), photography, reef aquariums, gardening, astronomy and travel. In the last 6 years I've been to Mexico (3 times), Hawaii (2 times), Malaysia, Singapore, Spain, Portugal and Iceland. At 24 years old, I built my own telescope based on a design from a book. It was a 10" Newtonian reflector on a Dobsonian mount. It was big, heavy and ugly, but it worked. I could make out 7-8 of Jupiter's moons, and easily view the rings of Saturn.

Through my love of reef aquariums and web development, I've integrated my 120 gallon reef aquarium with the Internet, via a series of tubes. By creating a png image from the xml output from my reef controller, I can view the tank conditions (pH, temperature, salinity, status of heaters, fans and lights) online instantly. I've also got a network cam (username is guest, no password) on the tank so I can view it remotely to make sure everything is fine while I'm on vacation. Coupled with Fusion Charts, I wrote a console app that records tank conditions from the XML created by my reef controller every 15 minutes. It then saves the values into a database. I created charts that will show me what the temperature, salinity and pH are throughout the week at 15 minute intervals. Currently my pH and salinity probes are broken and showing incorrect values, so the charts for those are very odd. This is very useful in pinpointing problems in the system, as I'll know if the tank got too hot or cold one day indicating a problem with a heater, fans or lighting.

I'm an avid PC builder as well. I've been building my own PCs for about 15 years, usually getting my parts from NewEgg. My current PC uses a six core AMD processor overclocked from 3.2GHz to 4GHz, 16GB of DDR3 RAM, 64GB SSD and two ATI HD 6870 video cards run in Cross Fire.

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