So, who am I and what's my place in the Computer/Internet ecosystem?
Well, I wrote my first code on a TRS-80 Model One with Level 1 Basic, a Z80 CPU clocked at 1.77MHz, 4K (yes, K) of RAM and a cassette drive for mass storage. That was in 1979 at Robertson High School in Las Vegas New Mexico. I'll never forget Mr. Escudero. He taught math, some science, some art history... and a special program that gave a poor kid like me access to some advanced programs. As we outgrew basic Mr. Escudero arranged for the kids in his computer science class to use the local college mainframe. We learned fortran on punch cards. We learned fast to number the cards in pencil in case we dropped them. Rapid Application Development? Ha!
It's 30 years later (can that be possible?) and a lot has changed. I have two kids of my own, I live in San Francisco and I've not been to New Mexico since my Grandmother passed away about 6 years ago. I'm typing this on a Dell Notebook PC with a dual core CPU clocked at 2.5 GHz, 4 Gigabytes of RAM and a 500 Gigabyte hard drive. Let's just say I don't do punch cards.
By day I manage two teams of outstanding Engineers at the leading company in the Digital Signage industry. I won't share much here about that industry, that job, or those people... this is about all the other parts of my life. I still do some minor consulting for old customers (and the occasional new one) as well as playing with various technologies old and new. My kids keep me busy too - and I'll write a lot about them I expect. My dog Ollie (in the banner) provides amusement that may sometimes make the blog. And baseball! Cut me and I bleed orange for my San Francisco Giants.
I plan on writing about a lot of technologies - voice over IP (VoIP), video over IP (IPTV), networking, and of course Linux. I'm especially interested in the resurgence of C programming. I taught myself C while underway on a nuclear submarine in 1989 using Borland Turbo C on a Intel 80286-based notebook PC. I never realized that within a few years I'd be programming major projects in C - on linux no less. My first linux was installed in 1994 and was a pre-1.0 kernel I got from somewhere. Fairly soon I was using linux in production - and even wrote an article for the Linux Journal about it.
Here we are 20 years after I learned C. Java is predominate in my day job - as is PHP, C++, and python - but C is still in use. It's certainly strong in the linux kernel space, the embedded space and for high performance code. I actually think that as we move towards slower, more power efficient systems that C makes a lot more sense for a lot more projects. Java is more mass-production... C is for finely crafted systems. You have to work more, it takes some skill to do well, but the results are like fine art. I'll probably get some flames for my strong C bias, but hey, what's the fun of no controversy, right? I'm sure my posts will generate some. I look forward to it - and to exploring what comes up in this blogging effort so long delayed. It should be fun!
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