Welcome to Craig's Home Page

While I've made plenty of pages on the web, they have all been for stuff I have written or projects I've worked on. These sets of pages are the group that links it all together.

About me

Sometimes people are looking for other people that they haven't seen for a while. My name is pretty common so let's get some information out there so if I'm not the Craig Small you're looking for, you can wander off to your next search hit.

I was born in 1971, went to Heathcote Public, Sutherland Public and Heathcote High Schools. I then went to University of Technology, Sydney graduating with a Bachelor of Engineering in Computer Systems Engineering. I have lived at Heathcote, Loftus, Charlestown, Penshurst, Minto, Menai and Mount Annan. With the exception of Charlestown (near Newcastle, NSW, Australia) all of these places are Sydney, Australia, suburbs.

I've worked at State Rail and Optus (now back there), plus plenty of other smaller places for a few days at a time. I'm still in IT and computer networks.

Currently I'm married with one son, a dog and we all live just outside Canberra in a place that has way too many kangaroos.

So if you're still reading, you either know me or are real bored and would read anything and all the good websites are slow or down or something. Anyhow it's all here for someone to read.

Contacting Craig

I'm always keen to hear from people from my past or that use the variety of software I have written or the webpages here. Just drop me a line at

Free Software

Since late 1994 I have been a Free Sofware programmer. Many people, if they have even heard of it, would also know it as the more common term Open Source software. There is a difference between the two that I care about.

Programs I have either written, maintained or submitted patches to sit on millions of computers around the world; which is pretty cool.

Online Civil Liberties

It's a well-known fact that people are often scared of things they don't understand. Australian Governments at a state and federal level have, for the most part, shown they don't understand new technology (like television and radio in the past and The Internet now). As a result, they often attempt to legislate impossible or the stupid laws which restrict what Australians can do on The Internet.

I'm not one for saying there should be no laws for The Internet, that it should be one giant free for all, but why should things that are OK in the real world be banned on The Internet? Why attempt to bring in laws that don't solve the problem, but make the distribution of information or the building a website that much harder?

I belong to an organisation called Electronic Frontiers Australia which is an Australian organisation run by Australians to protect the civil liberties of online users and operators (like the people that run your ISP).

My GPG key

In the beginning there was PGP, or Pretty Good Privacy. Now there is GnuPG or GNU Privacy Guard. Both programs allow you to electronically sign and encrypt email or other electronic files. My key is on most keyservers but I also keep a copy of my PGP key on this website.

The Muppets

I am a big fan of the muppets, I use the names of the Muppets to name my computers. There is now the Muppet World Website.

Internet Query Tools

I work as a engineer building networks and internets. We're the people that put the "stuff" that goes between your computer you are using now and whatever websites you happen to be browsing. I'm collecting a set of tools which I regularly use here.

Let me know what you think of them or if you know of any more interesting ones. I'm constantly updating that page when I find something new.

Not Me

There are a few of us around the world. My firstname and surname are not exactly rare things so you would expect some duplicates. If the other Craig Small's email me they get added to this list. Here is a list of people who are me by name only:

• Craig Small in Colorado, USA who has a website nuttier than mine (website www.funnybacon.com down).
• Craig Small in Toronto, Canada who has our domain and is involved in film and broadcast design.

If your a Craig Small and want to be listed here then let me know. We do the link swap thing. Improves your Google ranking and impress your friends (only if they are the sort that are easily impressed). It increases my ranking too, so it won't help you with the ego search; that just needs you write lots of emails and free software so you get the tons of spam like me.

As far as I am aware, I also do not appear in any of the images found when searching for "Craig Small" on Google Images though most of what is found for the first few pages of Google is about me.

Contacting me

To contact me you can either email the link right down the bottom. Alternatively if you are part of the Instant Messaging (IM) network called Jabber then my JID is csmall@jabber.org.au. .