Author name and some author meta information not appearing with post

I have been editing the css and html of the default theme to style it to match my current site. All fine until now.

I wanted to show authors names under the post title. I have tried a few ways of doing this with no success.

Firstly after not getting them to appear with a post, I got the list of author names to appear in the side bar. After this success I created an author.php file and this correctly showed names in an authors page etc. Using this code outside ‘the loop’:

<!-- This sets the $curauth variable -->
	<?php if(isset($_GET['author_name'])) : $curauth = get_userdatabylogin($author_name); else : $curauth = get_userdata(intval($author)); endif;  ?>
	<h2>About: <?php echo $curauth->nickname; ?></h2>
	<dl>
		<dt>Website</dt>
		<dd><a href="<?php echo $curauth->user_url; ?>"><?php echo $curauth->user_url; ?></a></dd>
		<dt>Profile</dt>
		<dd><?php echo $curauth->user_description; ?></dd>
	</dl>
	<h2>Posts by <?php echo $curauth->nickname; ?>:</h2>

I put the same code in single.php (above the loop) and no values were shown at all. I tired putting this code from the postmetadata part of the codex in (http://codex.wordpress.org/Post_Meta_Data_Section)

POST TITLE: <?php the_title(); ?><br />
AUTHOR: <?php the_author(); ?><br />
POSTED: <?php the_time('jS F Y') ?><br />
FILED AS: <?php the_category(', ') ?><br />
COMMENT FEED: <?php comments_rss_link('RSS 2.0'); ?><br />
PREVIOUS: <?php previous_post('%', '', 'yes', 'yes'); ?><br />
NEXT: <?php next_post('%', '', 'yes', 'yes'); ?>

But again no Author Name, all other values were fine.

So I need help with echoing the author name to the single post page please.