Peter's place
This is Peter van Sebille's little corner on the internet. A place where I document my, mostly software, hobby projects.About me
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Just like so many of my contemporaries, I've been playing around with home computers since when I
was an early teenager.
My first digital love was the TI 99/4a.
My second, the Schneider CPC464
which was a German rebranded (in boring gray colors!)
Amstrad CPC464.
This was all about typing-in games from computer magazines. Remember the long pages of hex code! And also about writing both BASIC programs and, in case of the Amstrad, Z80 assembly. |
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From the age of 14-15 I knew I would go study computer science at
the University of Delft, where I graduated in 1995. I not only have very fond memories of Delft because of my
time as a student, but also because this is where I met
Birgit, the love of my life. Born and raised in the beautiful, historic city of
Delft, she was 4 years ahead of me; also studying computer
science, graduating in 1991.
I recently found a copy of my Master's thesis which I did at NIKHEF in Amsterdam. Another blast from the past is this report (Dutch) describing an utility that mounts a Linux ext2 file system in MS-DOS. I wrote that in 1995 for my Desing and implementation Operating Systems class. |
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We've lived in Rotterdam between 1994 & 1998, where I worked as an IT consultant (PAC in the Hague, Xirion in Utrecht and Origin/BSO in Rotterdam). |
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In 1998 we moved to the UK, where we lived in the great city of
Manchester for 13 years. Whereas Manchester was a boring, gray-industrial city when we arrived in 1998, it was
very vibrant when we left in 2011.
In the UK, I've worked at Sony Ericsson for just over 10 years. Our software department was responsible for all on-device software for Sony Ericsson's Symbian-based mobile phones. I'm very proud to be one of the engineers having worked on the iconic R380 (still Ericsson at the time). The R380 was the first mobile phone released on Symbian OS. |
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During my time in the UK I was most productive in my hobby projects. First porting software to Psion devices, then playing with porting Linux to those devices, and finally porting software to Sony Ericsson's Symbian-based mobile phones. In meetings with people from the Symbian industry I regularly got introduced as "the guy who ported Doom to Symbian OS" :-) |
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In 2011 we moved back to the Netherlands where I spent 3 years at TomTom working on navigation software for both TomTom's own GPS devices and automotive customers. |
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Between 2014-2017 I worked at Canon Europe as Director R&D in Healthcare IT. |
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I also worked a year at De Haan IT as CIO working on cash register software and solutions. |
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Late 2017 I moved back to TomTom where I work as a software development team lead
in the Location and Navigation Services (LNS) department. We provide online Maps APIs
that includes online map visualization and online search.
My team processes the TomTom world map and transforms this into data that can be used for our online search service. The transformation is run in the cloud and our challenge is to do this efficiently (RAM & CPU cost) and in a timely fashion (lead time). |
About yipton.net
Yipton is the name of a city on the world Cadwal in the trilogy
Cadwal Chronicles, written
by my favorite science fiction writer Jack Vance.
It sounded quite unique so in 1998 when I moved to the UK and became UK ISP Demon.co.uk's customer,
my website was yipton.demon.co.uk. In 2002 I bought the domain
yipton.net.
Other Jack Vance references
I've operated as a contractor for a few years in the UK, trading under the name
Suldrun Ltd.
Suldrun is a princess in the trilogy
Lyonesse Trilogy.
When in 2014 I needed a name for a sloop I'd bought, I turned again to
Jack Vance for help.
I choose Madouc, a fairy-child who was switched at birth with Suldrun's baby Dhrun.
Madouc's adventures are the subject of the 3rd book in the
Lyonesse Trilogy.
In 2019 I bought Madouc 2, an
Oud Huijzer 6161 tender. You can mostly see me cruising on the
Loosdrechtse plassen and river de Vecht.
Code snippets in the header
For those of you who care: In the header of my web-pages you see four code snippets from my own hand. From left to right:
- Z80 assembly I manually disassembled from some game on the Amstrad/Schneider CPC464 when I was 14 years old
- A C code snippet from fsdext2 describing an ext2fs on-disk datastructure
- ARM assembly from a Symbian OS device driver in Arlo which switches off virtual memory prior to bootstrapping the Linux kernel
- A snippet from NetDVD when creating a driver object in an NT kernel device driver