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Paul's Home Page

Let's start with a picture.

Paul in short sleeved shirt

Something special must have happened, as I'm wearing one of those things with buttons on that requires ironing. The picture was taken probably early to mid 1999.

A few details about me. Well, three paragraphs.

Paul Floyd

Age 55. Born in Tondu, South Wales. Moved to Manchester to become a student. I liked Manchester so much that I stayed there to do my PhD as well.

My PhD subject was "Investigation into Pit Formation Mechanisms in Dye-Polymer Optical Data Storage Systems". Basically, it is the same technology as in CD-R (write once CDs).

In my spare time I work on Valgrind. Mostly I work on FreeBSD, which was not an official part of the Valgrind source when I started. The port was in a poor state having had only the occasional bug fix for several years. I fixed almost all of the issues to get the quality up to the same level as Linux and also merged the port into the official Valgrind source. In addition the FreeBSD I've also worken on Linux issues, threading problems in DRD and Helgrind, ehancements to Memcheck and DHAT. I've also tried to keep the macOS and Solaris ports at least buildable. If you'd like to support this work please take a look at my github page and consider sponsoring. See the table of links at the top of this page.

After growing up in Wales, studing in Machester, working a bit in Hampshire I emigrated to France, married and had 2 children. Career wise, in reverse chronological order we have:

Mentor again, got sacked by Synopsys in one of their bi-annual cost cutting layoffs. Rejoined Mentor (now Siemens EDA), working on Fast SPICE simulation.
Synopsys, bought Atrenta, worked on same stuff.
Atrenta, working on power reduction in Verilog and VHDL designs, plus some work on AMS interfaces.
Mentor Graphics, working on their Questa ADMS product, in particular on the Verilog-AMS simulator component.
Silvaco working on interconnect parasitic extraction.
Focal Ingénierie Sud (taken over by Osiatis, sometime around the end of 2005, web page no longer exists), third party maintenance of the tools used to load the BIOS and OS on HP PCs on the assembly line. Well, in actuality, I spent a lot of time installing Oracle databases. Not really the stuff of a PhD in Electronics.
Netmansys (no web page!, but you can see a team photo from March 1999), customer support and training. Netmansys closed its doors on the 31st May 1999 and went into liquidation around the 20th June of the same year.
Euronav working on digital marine charts.

More personal information here.

Opinionated essays

I've written some of my thoughts about computers mostly a long time ago.

My CVs

My CV
Et aussi en français.

Inquieting Questions

Click to see how my original HMHB pages have evolved. These pages started out as a means to get explanations for all of the curious references in the lyrics of the Biscuits songs, and have now evolved into a full-blown fan site.

Odds & Ends

I'm quite a big fan of Private Eye, both their humour and investigative journalism (even if they do cock it up every once in a while and end up being sued for absurd sums of money).

Private Eye

Production Details

I tried using a few graphical HTML editors, but was never satisfied with any of them. Perhaps the newer ones are better. My CVs started out in Netscape and MS Word, but the HTML they write is not pretty. Otherwise, they are all hand written with a text editor. If you think that the default text on default background is boring, then you can always configure your browser to change them. Since I consider excessive images, animations and background wallpaper to be a waste of time, I don't use any of them. They just clog up network bandwidth for no real increase in information conveyed. If I'm not careful I'll start singing the praises of Gopher over HTTP.

In the good old days I had my own web server, now I have to slum it on free webspace.

The counter shows the miserably low number of people to have accessed this page.

Counter showing small number.

Feedback

If you have any suggestions, corrections or just are bored, e-mail me at paul.floyd@laposte.net

Alternatively, for another of my addresses that receives less spam, you can find my "free" address either with a bit of googling, or else take this address (the bit after http:// and before the next /), and replace the first dot with an at.