About Me

I'm ThermalSoarer, a computing (a.k.a Computer Science) student at Bournemouth University in Dorset, UK. I created this site as a place to show off some of the stuff I have done in the X-Plane flight simulator and a few programs I've written.

My X-Plane projects come in a variety of types. The first project I started was an aircraft, the Jet Provost, which is still in progress, and soon after started work on a plugin, my Commercial Pilot Project. I've also done some repaints for various aircraft and more recently have worked on some scenery for X-Plane, mostly WED layouts.

Since 2006 I've been programming in various languages, starting with Visual Basic 6.0 and then moving into Delphi. For the past few years though I've focused more on Java, which I've been learning as part of my degree, as well as C#, which I've been learning in my spare time. Using C# and the XNA Framework released by Microsoft I'm currently in the process of making a game, Air Transport Manager, which I hope to have released soon. I have also begun trying to learn C++ in my spare time, however right now my focus with programming is on C#.

This site was written by hand initially in Notepad but all recent updates have been made in the Eclipse IDE. Originally the site followed XHTML 1.0 standards but recently it has been changed to conform to the newer HTML 5 standard.

Since its creation in 2010 this site has changed much as my ability to write HTML, CSS and PHP has grown, and my desires for the look and feel of the site have changed. The overall basic layout has remained the same with the navigation bar fixed to the left-hand side of the page, the content in the middle and the ads on the right; however lots of details within those elements have been modified. The biggest change in the latest version of the site, put online in 2012, is the inclusion of a PHPBB forum. This has made possible many new features, such as the news feed on the front page and the user info box in the top right-hand corner of every non-forum page.

Included on this site is some 3rd party code. One of these is the Javascript menu written by Dynamic Drive. Another is the PHPBB news feed on the front page which is based on code provided by the PHPBB Community. The video player is a HTML 5 video player by VideoJS that extends the default HTML5 video player included on all modern browsers with additional finctionality, as well as a flahs player fallback feature for older browsers. The final 3rd party script is the AddThis social bookmarking script which enables quick sharing of pages to a variety of social networks and link sharing websites as well as e-mail.

Hosting provided by 1&1 UK.