Graham Toal's Homepage

If you came here because you run a font site and are worried because a web spider downloaded large numbers of fonts, please go here for an explanation.

IF YOU ARE LOOKING FOR THE EDINBURGH COMPUTING HISTORY PROJECT, YOU'VE FOUND IT. CLICK HERE.

Somewhat tangentially related: if you are interested in the history of Bathgate, or just like to read Auld Scots as it was spoken around the turn of the century, turn to A Bit of Old Bathgate.

My last major project was CDDB, but that has now passed on into more professional hands.

If you like playing adventure games (Dungeon and Zork) go to my Interactive Fiction page, where you'll find several of these that you can play online.

A couple of years ago I prototyped a network discovery program for the University of Texas, but they decided to employ some students to write it rather than hire a professional... with the expected result of course that it never worked. As a result of my prototype I still have various tools around related to network exploration and geocoding (they wanted a map). One of the more generally useful of those is a utility to find your map coordinates and convert them to a LOC record for adding to your DNS. Although the map initially displays Texas, you can actually geocode any location by zooming out and panning across to your own state before zooming in again. LOC records are fun and I recommend getting a graphical traceroute program which takes advantage of them...

My current project of interest is writing word game programs. I've also finally got my finger out and started putting my software online. My software page (UPDATED Feb 04!) is currently tiny in comparison to what I've written over the years since I started programming (1974 I believe - 3rd year at High School) but it is a long slow job to take old code, get it working again, and put it on the web in a form that will be useful to someone. If I get the job finished before my 60th birthday I'll be quite content. (That gives me about 20 years, in case you're wondering). Related to this effort, and indirectly the cause of it, is my old Acorn Archimedes. I worked for Acorn for many years and did a lot of BBC Micro and Acorn Archimedes programming. I had backed up all my code to Archimedes format floppy disks, then promptly found myself in a situation where I was without an Archie for about 10 years. I did eventually (1999) buy an Archie second hand from a nice kid in England who shipped it over to me here in Texas, and I managed to get about 200 disks restored to the hard disk ... when the monitor blew. So, no more Archie again, and about 800 more floppies still to be recovered. I was stuck in this state for about a year when I discovered that the Archimedes emulators on the net had advanced to a stage where they were actually useful - about as fast as my real Archie had been (if I used a damned fast PC to emulate them) and - more importantly - one of the emulators could now access real floppy drives, rather than disk images off hard drive. So I've been spending most of my spare time during the Christmas vacation uploading Archie format floppies to a Windows hard drive. At last. It's been fun to see some of my old sources again.

I have a few other things I ought to put up here too, but there's never enough time in the day to have a life and hack web pages as well that no-one ever reads, so if you're just dying to find out about all the birds that can be seen from our back garden, you're just going to have to wait. My recipe book is still online. Never did add the extra recipes I promised I would. What happened? In short, I got a life and frankly don't care all that much any more! There is no resumé here, as I really don't need a new job. The one I have suits me just fine, thanks.

Talking of work, I gave a talk recently on how to subnet (the talk sucked the big one, but the presentation materials were reasonable).

If any long lost relatives read this, my parents (Martin Toal and Doris Toal, neé Doris Graham) have email nowadays, and I'll pass on your mail if you mail me below. I'm not putting their addresses here because they haven't yet learned the joys of junk mail and with a great deal of luck never will.

Any random strangers by the name of Toal who feel a compulsion to mail me to ask about our family tree, just bugger off will you? I'm definitely not interested. All I can say is "the fruit never falls far from the tree", verb sap, eh?

Other things to squeeze into this page before I run out of room: I have a neice; I take stereo (3-D) photos. Another unfinished and abandoned page but mildly interesting even in its current incarnation. I have a HUGE (40Mb) MPG file of my pet pecker. Download it, you won't be disappointed.

Did you know there was once a bug in Yahoo that allowed *anyone* to see what the last search was for? This was raw data, not the cleaned up version that the search engine spy sites let you see. Here is what the average net user was looking for on an average day in January 1998. Not for readers of a <sensitive disposition> (500K)

Here's a 3.5Mb WAV file of some weird Australian guy who recorded a message on my answering machine tape for me.

Here's a list of people I know (or knew) who I've lost track of; if any of you get on the net and are searching for your own name (how narcissistic! but doesn't everyone, eventually?), and spot this, please drop me a line at the address below!

Karen Scott neé Karen Archbold or Karen Louise Archbold; Yvonne Millard; Mary Lockhart; Ann McDowall; Jacqui Barwick/Jackie Barwick; Robbie MacAuley (Robbie McAuley?); Graham Stout; Gordon Wilson; Fred King; Jamie Smith; any of the Acorn Cambridge crowd up to when I left; several others from the mid 70's/early 80's at Edinburgh University or Edinburgh OTC whose names I've forgotten. Ditto my flatmates and classmates from UMIST; A very small number of people from Preston Lodge 1971-1976. There are a whole lot of people out there who I never care if I ever hear from again. If you're saying to youself "I bet he means me" then I probably do. You know who you are.