Colin's Previous Newspaper Systems Experience

April 1988 – May 1996

Miles 33 Plc develop software for the newspaper, commercial typesetting and legal marketplaces. During my employment, I was largely involved with the OASYS UNIX typesetting product range. This product runs on Sun workstations under the 'X' windowing system and SunView. In my last year, I ran the newspaper applications development department. As well as software development, I gained knowledge of the newspaper, publishing and printing industries. Following the on-line advertising project at Miles 33, I became more interested in electronic publishing and to further this aim I joined Database Publishing Systems Ltd as a consultant.

September 1994 - April 1988

Newspaper Applications Programming Manager, Miles 33 Plc

As Newspaper Applications Programming Manager I had total responsibility over between four and six programmers. The development team is split into two main sections. One half of the programmers maintain and enhance the SPACE classified advertisement booking system. SPACE is a multi-user database program developed in the TAS professional programming language. The database programmers also have responsibility for providing ODBC links to other applications. The Windows programming team develop various products using Microsoft Visual C++ and C. These products include an advert page make-up program and various Quark XTensions. The main Quark XTension "Edition" turns XPress from a single user page make-up package into a complete multi-user editorial system. I am responsible for all bug fixing and enhancements of the product line.

Miles 33 Newspaper systems have an extensive customer base in the UK including the Daily Mirror, Scottish Daily Record and most of the main regional newspaper groups. I have been involved in discussions with many customers and potential customers at all levels. I recently gave a presentation at out Newspaper Products user group (over sixty people from system managers to group directors). I am also frequently involved in sales situations where I demonstrate the latest developments and talk about future technology issue with clients. At last years "Newstec" (a major UK newspaper show) I demonstrated links from our software to free text searching, Acrobat and Internet technologies. It was also my responsibility to ensure that the new software prototypes were ready and demonstrable prior to the exhibition.

I have been involved in producing the user and technical specifications for two new products based around Verity electronic library systems. These products take text, graphics and database information from our systems and feed them into data repositories. These systems will be based around a free text retrieval engine with links to a graphical database package. I have designed the system to be flexible enough to store and retrieve data in many formats including Adobe Acrobat, SGML and HTML (for Web servers).

The first set of these systems, which allow local or remote users to search for cars advertised in local newspapers are now live in various customer sites (an example can be found at www.autonet.co.uk). An interesting part of this project was the development of a parsing program that analyses the text prior to submission to the database to allow identification of car prices, registration numbers and mileage. I developed the parsing program myself using the interpreted language Perl that is particularly suitable for text analysis.