Website!

Hi, I’m Mi­chael Smith. Un­usu­al name, I know. And to make mat­ters worse, most people on­line just call me mike.

If I may briefly in­dulge in some well-earned self-praise: I’m pretty darn good at telling com­puters what to do. I cur­rently work as a pro­fes­sion­al per­son-who-tells-com­puters-what-to-do at a fairly large com­puter-telling-what-to-do com­pany in my home coun­try of Scot­land. In whichever por­tion of my free time I man­age not to while away on video games, I oc­ca­sion­ally tell my own com­puter what to do for a laugh, and I in­tend to pub­lish the out­come of such amuse­ment here such that oth­ers may have their com­puters do the same things, if de­sired.

Though there are some oth­er bits and bobs here and there and in vari­ous states of in­com­plete­ness, the thing I’ve poured the most time into and that’s most likely to be use­ful to an­oth­er hu­man per­son is my Source En­gine plu­gin with tools for speedrun­ners, which I have very cre­at­ively named Source Speedrun Tools. SST is now widely used by speedrun­ners of both Left 4 Dead series games and Portal 1, and over time aims to be use­ful in oth­er Source games such as Half-Life 2 and its mods as well. Its de­vel­op­ment has been helped along by sev­er­al cool people; go read more about it on the page!

Oth­er ran­dom things I’ve worked on are a bit scattered around and not quite so well-doc­u­mented over here, but for the curi­ous, links to some of those things are lis­ted here:

• A pro­to­type of a new build sys­tem, named build (I un­for­tu­nately lack time to de­vel­op it fur­ther).
• A very small C unit test­ing lib­rary which tends to get copied into all of my C pro­jects (SST’s ver­sion sup­ports Win­dows)
• A very cobbled-to­geth­er tool to gen­er­ate cam­paign cycler scripts for Left 4 Dead 2 speedrun­ning
• The script cur­rently used to auto-up­date Bunnymod XT in the Half-Life old ver­sion pack­ages used by speedrun­ners.
• Some long-un­pub­lished heavy elec­tron­ic mu­sic that may or may not ever see the light of day…

I'm also a big film fan and have a fairly long list of re­com­men­ded movies for any­one in­ter­ested.