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Author Topic: Lago Torre  (Read 4460 times)

drmike

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Re: Lago Torre
« Reply #20 on: August 19, 2017, 11:53:05 am »

Good lord it does sound like we had a similar software background. I taught at what we called a technical college aimed at young adults but I got onto the business development side so I taught (well sort of) adults in business who needed IT skills. This would be the early 80's. I also taught C to some local Defence people and to my horror had one of the authors of Algol in one group. Algol won't mean much in the US but it was a British language designed to compete with FORTRAN and probably COBOL for all I know. I failed but was very elegant which is nice but not essential. I left the college to go solo and I suspect they breathed a sigh of relief :)

After some false starts (this was in the early days) I settled on VB and MS SQL Server. My most used software was for a gun trading platform - yes Russ we do buy and sell guns in the UK but the legislation is tight, very tight so this guy (a viscount no less, I can't reveal who really but he will be an earl in one of the oldest noble families one day) could only offer a trading platform and not actually buy and sell. It was and is very popular connecting 200 dealers nationwide to the punters.

Software is fun. One of the best projects was with a local manufacturer who made the biggest linear friction welder in the world. They could save 80% waste on titanium parts and just on seat brackets alone Boeing could get a free 747 each year. Working for aerospace is all about traceability and that was where I came in with my database skills. Clearly they were a big firm but the welder team was about 10 guys.

I'll miss some of the fun challenges but not the sometimes crackpot requests which are utterly pointless and just waste money and my time.

My son is also into development although his is mostly user UI for web sites. He taught me enough that I could do some database driven web site coding. No dancing penguins but grind it out database.

You probably predate my start by about 7-10 years?

Mike

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RSL

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Re: Lago Torre
« Reply #21 on: August 19, 2017, 03:57:09 pm »

I sent you a message, Mike. We're way off the subject here.
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Russ Lewis  www.russ-lewis.com.

drmike

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Re: Lago Torre
« Reply #22 on: August 19, 2017, 04:48:13 pm »

Got it Russ :)
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Farmer

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Re: Lago Torre
« Reply #23 on: August 19, 2017, 07:16:26 pm »

Basic, Z80 assembly

I was never a coder, but I learned both BASIC and Z80 Assembly back in the early to mid 80's (as a 12-16 year old).  A few years later I taught myself some REXX scripting to meet some needs, but that was about it.  But having learned that?  I'm glad I did - was fascinating and helped with problem solving all through my life.
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Phil Brown

drmike

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Re: Lago Torre
« Reply #24 on: August 20, 2017, 02:31:53 am »

I never intended to be a coder, I was a pure mathematician but for sundry reasons couldn't make a long term academic career after the PhD. I found that having been a good mathematician coding held few fears as in the end it's raw logic and that was a given. Pure maths is also very creative so you had to think around problems and learned to apply brute force only when all else failed.

Mike
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Jeremy Roussak

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Re: Lago Torre
« Reply #25 on: August 20, 2017, 04:29:57 am »

I loved building software, and for a short while I taught the C programming language at Colorado Tech. Later on I taught C++ to a group of Cirrus Logic engineers. I had a ball with the whole thing, and built stuff in everything from Basic, Z80 assembly, Fortran and Cobol to C#.

There are more programmers lurking here than I'd imagined.When I manage to retire, I hope to start writing software again. I enjoy it.

I loved C (having used BCPL a lot as an undergraduate) but never got to grips with C++. Did you ever read this?? Very funny.

Jeremy
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Eric Myrvaagnes

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Re: Lago Torre
« Reply #26 on: August 20, 2017, 11:55:31 am »

Been there, done that.

Several flavors of BASIC, FORTRAN, COBOL, PL1, C, Assembler language for the DEC PDP-1 and for the original IBM PC, and a tiny bit of Forth, plus probably a few that I've completely forgotten. All I do on computers now is email, LightRoom, PhotoShop, LuLa, and a bit of web surfing.

I really enjoyed teaching and writing small, compact programs that worked efficiently. Since software has become so bloated, I've lost interest.

Pictures is where the action is, for me.   :)
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-Eric Myrvaagnes (visit my website: http://myrvaagnes.com)

RSL

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Re: Lago Torre
« Reply #27 on: August 20, 2017, 02:33:28 pm »

Looks as if just about everybody on LuLa was a programmer.

That link is a hoot, Jeremy. Actually, there's some truth to that farce. If you swallow the whole C++ enchilada you can cause yourself some problems, but in general it's a step in the right direction. C# is even better because it's designed to keep you from making some of the mistakes you're almost bound to make in C++. My grandson tells me there are later iterations that are even more foolproof (though you gotta remember there are a lot of fools out there).

And Eric, years ago I knew an older guy who was making a bundle maintaining Cobol stuff for banks. Younger folks simply didn't know Cobol, and the banks had sunk fortunes into their creaky Cobol systems and weren't about to dump them, so the guy had a huge market and not a lot of competition. He was laughing all the way to the bank. I thought about trying it, but I really disliked Cobol.  You actually could write "ADD VERMOUTH TO GIN GIVING MARTINI," which was the equivalent in any reasonable programming language of "martini = gin + vermouth."

PL1, by the way, was the first language I used to write a program -- at IBM when I attended their 360 introductory course. Not long after the IBM trip I attended a DOD seminar at the Pentagon entitled "Specifications for Selection" and learned that even though the 360 was in operation the government had never heard there was such a thing as multitasking.

And I always loved teaching. The only reason I didn't continue at CTU was that I was losing too much money per hour. CTU was paying something like $12 per classroom hour (didn't include preparation or grading)  and I was charging as much as $100 / hr for designing and building software systems, which in those days was a bundle.
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Russ Lewis  www.russ-lewis.com.

drmike

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Re: Lago Torre
« Reply #28 on: August 20, 2017, 03:44:00 pm »

I'm not surprised by the number of programmers here of a certain vintage anyway. Programmers tend to be those that like technology and when I was young the most accessible technology that produced end results was photography. I suspect it was that aspect that may have drawn a lot of us in. Geeks before our time :)

Add to that that wet photography processing is very process driven and that you can vary the process to get different results just how close to programming are you getting? Same with lenses, exposure, macro work etc. It's all very rule based and logical but then you build something bigger by taking the simple rules/processes and combining them.

Finally, programming is usually creative as you have to solve problems.

I'm not surprised at all. I wonder how many photographers missed their vocation and should be programmers. Damn sight easier than wedding photography :)

Mike
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RSL

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Re: Lago Torre
« Reply #29 on: August 20, 2017, 04:42:38 pm »

Damn sight easier than wedding photography :)

Mike

And nowhere near as hairy. When you're doing wedding photography everybody around you is an expert. When you're doing software things are a lot quieter.
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Russ Lewis  www.russ-lewis.com.

drmike

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Re: Lago Torre
« Reply #30 on: August 20, 2017, 04:44:47 pm »

There are risks however. I once brought a steel mill to a standstill just by copying a file on the server. No-one thought to tell me that this was 'a know issue'.
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