This site hosts my own stuff, and also my daughter Jo Foster's dissertation: `Images of Empire in 1930s boys' adventure fiction'.
If you're here because you've heard of my Zaurus Oscilloscope project, then click here.
If you're here because of an interest in software development for the PlayStation 2, this page contains the account of how I did a setup of the PS2 and its development kit within a small Linux network.
In 1993 I completed my PhD thesis: "Cost Factors in Software Maintenance". Astonishingly, I still get the occasional request for a copy, so I've now converted it to HTML from the original LaTeX and posted it here, plus a small file containing just the abstract. The main thesis is a single large (350K) file plus an associated style file and images. Please let me know by email if you find anything of interest in there: it'll encourage me to keep it available.
More recently, here is a small share-trading game. This version is an executable file for Windows, so unless you know and trust me you probably won't want to download it. It isn't a fully-fledged game. It's designed to test out one aspect of paper trading. The file is over 4Mbytes, so it may take a while to download.
I also have an interest in using XBee devices. If you haven't met them, they're a small integrated circuit with digital and analog inputs and outputs, and with a radio transmitter so that they can communicate between each other. They are also connectable to a PC or microcontroller so you can have a network of them obeying your every command. For the XBees, I have now started maintaining an Unofficial XBee FAQ, based on postings to the Digi XBee forums. You'll also find my XBee cookbook there, as well as the packet-check program.
You can email me as john at jsjf dot demon dot co dot uk. Sorry to write the address in that form, but the spam became a problem.