Alec Cove is a New York City based Software Engineer and Artist. His areas of research include data visualization, artificial life, and physically based modeling. He is the author of the physics engines APE and Flade, the both of which were technical merit finalists at Flash Forward. His web development skills and interest span most platforms, frameworks, and languages, and in particular j2ee, .Net, PHP, Flash, Flex, and ActionScript. He is the co-author of ‘Professional PHP5’ from Wrox Press.