Mr. Irvine's Home Page

"He held on for dear life, because he knew in his heart this fish was his."
graphic by Ray Troll

About Mr Irvine:

Mr. Irvine is presently a teacher of mathematics and computing studies at Forster High School.
He came to Forster in 1996 so he could be closer to the family farm at Elands.
Before that he was at Camden High School, a rural school about 60 minutes by car South West of Sydney.
Before that he went to Uni at the University of New England, Armidale.
Before that he worked as a design engineer in the materials testing business, (conveyor belts, coal crushers and such), as a computer programmer, as a tree planter, a deckhand on a salmon trawler, a builder's labourer, and a short stint at dishwashing.
Mr Irvine has dual Australian / Canadian citizenship and has lived and worked in Northern Canada. He spent some of his primary school years in Northern Canada, and when he was 25 he went back on a working holiday. The coldest temperature he has been in is -46 degrees C.
Mr.Irvine used to spend a lot of his spare time sitting on top of hills and cliffs waiting for the wind to blow in the right direction. Mrs. Irvine has patiently cured him of this habit.

This page is a copy of one that resides on Forster High School's experimental intranet web server, "hermione.fhs.domain".
It was created in about an hour using the "edit" part of Netscape Navigator Gold. It was then rewritten using a unix text editor called vim so Mr. Irvine could learn a little about Cascading Style Sheets. This took much more than 1 hour.
Anyone can make a web page and put it on hermione, Forster High School's private web server. See Mr. Irvine. (We will be moving student accounts over to a new file server called ajax.fhs.domain sometime in 1999).
Adobe Pagemill is the best tool to write web pages with. However, if you really want to learn HTML, its best to use a text editor like simpletext, notepad, or BBedit.

My story about getting busted by Sydney Water Board goons - an attempt to package a pretty dry environmental issue in some colourful wrapping. First full web site I ever wrote.
Mr Irvine's resume.
A web page about making a high school intranet with FreeBSD. A little old now...
FreeBSD and Linux - What they can do for schools. This was a paper I presented at the Australian Computers in Education Conference in July 2000. Aimed at school computer coordinators and technology decision makers.
If you are teaching introductory computer programming, you want to know about the Perl language. I've made a short web page on teaching with Perl. You'll also find a booklet in .pdf format that your students can work through. More to come!
A beginner's guide to Understanding the IP Protocol, or “What All Those Numbers Mean”.