William Webber

Links

Hi! I'm a software developer based in Melbourne, Australia. You can contact me at william@williamwebber.com, or phone me on +61-0412-593-731.

My curriculum vitae is available in Open Office 1.0, MS Word 97, and HTML formats. It is rather out of date. I am not currently looking for work. If you're looking for contract software design or development work, I recommend Conchus software consultancy.

In November and December 2002, I taught an Introduction to C++ course at RMIT University, Australia. The lecture notes (.tar.gz file, 232K), based on the text book, Accelerated C++, by Andrew Koenig and Barbara E. Moo, are available. They are in LaTeX format.

A project that I used to spend time on regularly and found interesting is Distributed Proofreaders, whereby people proof-read OCR'ed public domain books for contribution to Project Gutenberg. I really should get back to this.

As a result of this, I became interested in OCR, and contributed code to GOCR, an open-source OCR program. I've contributed code optimising the error filtering, leading to a 60% speedup in the routine involved, and a 20% speedup in total program execution time. This code contains an interesting use of a binary tree. Unfortunately, I haven't worked on this for a while.

Along with Rodney Schneider, I developed the website for Kahootz, and I am still doing part-time maintenance on it. Kahootz is a great package developed by the Australian Childrens Television Foundation which allows schoolchildren to develop and share interactive 3-D scenes and scenarios. Well worth checking out!

I spent some time helping to document the Ruby standard library for the ruby-doc project. Ruby's a nice language: if Perl and Python don't quite do it for you, you should try it.

In 2004, I worked as a programmer in RMIT's Search Engine Group. Six years ago, I was working for SEG's predecessor, MDS, so my life seems to be cyclical. An alternative post-MDS trajectory is instanced by my friend Marcin Kaszkiel.

Since 2005, I have been working as a research assistant for Professor Alistair Moffat of the University of Melbourne. I have completed a project on Distributed Information Retrieval, for which I have (almost) gained my Masters in Software Engineering. I am currently working on Evaluation Metrics in Information Retrieval. My research page may be of interest to you, as may IREvalEtAl, my research blog.

In November and December 2004, I visited India with my mother, and took lots of photos. I visited again in December 2005 and took more photos.

A much more interesting page than this is maintained by my good friend Danny Calegari.