Well it is finally now official after several years of procrastinating I have finally made the jump and created my first post (this is my second) from my Nokia 5800 aka Tube. There are many times when one gets up and say today I will.... but that is as far as one usually gets where we find a multitude of reasons of why we should not do something rather than putting the energy into actually doing it.
I have been out of work since September last year after taking voluntary redundancy and as things globally have gotten worse I have been looking for "IT" work without much success. I have done the usual of posting my CV to several job boards, vigorously applying every week for jobs but no really no positive response. I get the occasional phone call from agencies seeing if I am available or following up applications I have made usually with a reason of why I am not suitable, I have switched Push email on my phone using IMAP IDLE with Profimail and jump each time I receive a mail hoping... However I believe it is times like these that you have to remain confident, continue looking but also remain actively doing things.
My passion as you have probably guessed is technology and people who know me will always say what has he got next, have you broken it or what are you looking at next. Since my early years I have always been interested in technology but still to this day I don't know really why. My brother was always into computers and had a Sinclair ZX81. I can remember him putting the motherboard in a proper keyboard and having the opportunity to play games such as 3D monster maze or pacman (represented by letters) on the machine. It was used on a 4 inch b&w TV and was fantastic, there was no sound, poor graphics but bloody good to play. I will never forget the time he showed me a program which produced sound on the ZX81. Those of you who know the equipment will recall how? as there was no speaker. To do this day all I can remember is that you recorded your voice to tape, stored it in the machine then it would try to modulate the TV picture in someway to recreate the sound. There were lots of lights flashing on the screen and we would turn up the TV volume and try and make out if it was our voice that we could hear.
Thereafter I had my own ZX spectrum where back then I would enter the log list of machine code programs in to the spectrum via a hex editor to produce 2 channel or more music, speed up the loading of software from tape or write simple demos but nothing what I would consider state of the art. It must have been around this time that I got urge to always push things to their limit. I had a break from computers for around a year until one Xmas where again my brother had an old Amstrad PPC512D with 1 x3.5" floppy drive, a CGA screen and would run on D batteries. This thing was considered a laptop but by today's affairs with MIDs (Mobile Internet Devices) it was big! I learned about msdos and the various commands of copy files, formatting disks etc and was a real introduction to command line. Also at the time I had an Atari ST of which an old friend helped me purchase. Again, I would do my usual of pushing my machine to its limits and always trying to find a way around things.
During my entry to university I used the Atari with a Hardware PC Emulator called supercharger which would allow me to run both the Atari and PC at the same time. I learned more about DOS and someone at Uni showed me about FTP, usenet, IP addresses, the JANET network and it is here where I interested in the Internet (1990 & 1991). At University in my second year our IT lab had HP UNIX workstations with 21" colour monitors, 32mb workstations & RISC processors running HP UNIX with X Windows. These machines were like heaven where it is only recently with Linux I have been able to find a comparison..... I could email, download, compile a program, print, write or run a script all at the same time and it just worked! I had my usual fun of locking the machines up but they certainly opened my mind to what a workstation could do.
When I built my first PC I was looking for an OS. In 1993 the only choices were OS/2, Windows or Deskview X. I tried Linux but I neither had the time or resource to learn about it and when I needed to run Ms Office back then I was severely limited. In 1994 I became a Windows 95 (aka Chicago) beta tester and at one point had linux, os/2, dos and windows 95 all on one machine. I event tried to boot windows 95 under an OS/2 Dos VM although could not get it working! As I was used to running several OSes at once I could not use OS/2 as it caned the machine when I ran Windows Apps, I could not stand DOS/WIN311 as it was a fudge (or elephant on top of a mini) and I couldn't get on with the interface restrictions so and I couldn't find anymore information about DeskView X - so Windows 95 seemed the choice. Although Windows 95 was not powerful enough for me. Typically I would use a wordprocessor for assignments and whilst we were writing and testing our code I would have to do screen shots. MS word at this time could not cope with me. I would take a typical screenshot in DOS - two colours and have to reduce the colour depth from 24 million colours to two so it could cope with the picture in word. When you have several of these it grinds to a halt. I tried MS Word for NT (a 32 bit app) as I thought more address space would be available for the application to run. It worked in Windows 95 just but was slow. When you include the fact I would use word indexing, contents, header formatting and frames Word would just collapse. Back then and still now I am of the opinion word is bad for long documents when you begin to use all of its features. I originally used to use Wordstar 4 in my pc emulator (remember CONTROL KK or CONTROL KB?) and would leave a blank page, print out my screenshot and physically glue it to the paper of my assignment. This worked, whereas word would grind to a halt. I found it is easy to use word for text editing than use a dedicated DTP (my first being Fleet street publisher on the atari) to do the layout.
Part of the beta testing program was also to test Office 95 which was better than word for NT and I loved the inline spell check. So it was windows 95 for the next few years until I discovered NT 4 workstation. This through my work took my to NT server, W2K, W2k3 and even had the opportunity to use IBM AIX and build two IBM RS6000 H70 for my company. Again, the latter is a great OS that just works even allowing you to resize disks online whilst people are using them - technology of which WINDOWS has only seen in the past few years whereas I am talking about this being available in 1997.
My next venture into Linux was 2006 where I tried to convert myself from my Windows blinkers to linux 100% but it failed because I was expecting too much. Because I had two mobile phones S60 and Windows mobile (private & work) I would exclusively sync with Outlook to PST folders. I would not keep anything on the exchange server purely using it as mailbox for email. Linux has never really had any good syncing clients and it wasn't until a year later after switching my XP desktop to lighter version that I made the switch to ubuntu. I chose this over Fedora or OpenSuse because I wanted something to work out of the box but would allow me to roll up my sleeves and get under the hood if I needed to. I decided to VMWARE my pc using VMConverter. I then ran ubuntu and my old pc under VMWARE for the next 18 months until I took redundancy. This in itself was an "age of discovery" as I had the best of both worlds where I gradually stopped using the full blown MS APPs and used Open Source alternatives such as OpenOffice, Firefox and openproj etc.... There were some issues with formatting in OpenOffice but as longs as I accepted I would never get 100% compatibility I could work with it. I never really switched off my vmware PC until I left work because of the syncing to outlook and still to this day it is a bug bear of which I will post another time.
Linux whichever flavour now runs on all of my machines as the default OS. I use opensuse 11 on my server as I find it is more suited for a file server. Things for example using YAST show more options and allow me to do more detailed things whereas Ubuntu hides them from the users. I know this is a generalistic view but I want to be able to set more detailed options inside of a GUI as it is usually quicker (not always) then CLI. Whereas I use ubuntu on my desktop and laptop as it has just the right level of configuratbility I need for a desktop OS. I also have a MID (mobile internet device) a nokia N810 which runs maemo linux which I use for browsing and other things where I don't want to boot a full PC. Lastly, there is the EEE PC which started the linux adventure off at home. This is now running Easy Peasy Linux (ubuntu) which is used as a device midway between my laptop and N810.
My laptop is a Dell Inspiron 1525 with upgrade hard drive to 320gb and upgrade ram to 3gb. Vista lasted two days and was wiped off after installing ubuntu. I run VMWARE of XP and W2k when needed as I use MS Money but have not found a decent Linux alternative. I have tried GNU CASH etc... but cannot get on with them.
Lastly, my data is in the cloud where I use this for my diary/contacts/email. I don't use google calendar and contacts as it has a long way to go. But as mentioned earlier I will blog about this sometime later because whilst it is a bug bear, mobile tech is still a passion for me.
In conclusion, I still laugh at a comment in an interview that I had where I was told I did not come over as technical.
However I will let you decide what you think.
I have been out of work since September last year after taking voluntary redundancy and as things globally have gotten worse I have been looking for "IT" work without much success. I have done the usual of posting my CV to several job boards, vigorously applying every week for jobs but no really no positive response. I get the occasional phone call from agencies seeing if I am available or following up applications I have made usually with a reason of why I am not suitable, I have switched Push email on my phone using IMAP IDLE with Profimail and jump each time I receive a mail hoping... However I believe it is times like these that you have to remain confident, continue looking but also remain actively doing things.
My passion as you have probably guessed is technology and people who know me will always say what has he got next, have you broken it or what are you looking at next. Since my early years I have always been interested in technology but still to this day I don't know really why. My brother was always into computers and had a Sinclair ZX81. I can remember him putting the motherboard in a proper keyboard and having the opportunity to play games such as 3D monster maze or pacman (represented by letters) on the machine. It was used on a 4 inch b&w TV and was fantastic, there was no sound, poor graphics but bloody good to play. I will never forget the time he showed me a program which produced sound on the ZX81. Those of you who know the equipment will recall how? as there was no speaker. To do this day all I can remember is that you recorded your voice to tape, stored it in the machine then it would try to modulate the TV picture in someway to recreate the sound. There were lots of lights flashing on the screen and we would turn up the TV volume and try and make out if it was our voice that we could hear.
Thereafter I had my own ZX spectrum where back then I would enter the log list of machine code programs in to the spectrum via a hex editor to produce 2 channel or more music, speed up the loading of software from tape or write simple demos but nothing what I would consider state of the art. It must have been around this time that I got urge to always push things to their limit. I had a break from computers for around a year until one Xmas where again my brother had an old Amstrad PPC512D with 1 x3.5" floppy drive, a CGA screen and would run on D batteries. This thing was considered a laptop but by today's affairs with MIDs (Mobile Internet Devices) it was big! I learned about msdos and the various commands of copy files, formatting disks etc and was a real introduction to command line. Also at the time I had an Atari ST of which an old friend helped me purchase. Again, I would do my usual of pushing my machine to its limits and always trying to find a way around things.
During my entry to university I used the Atari with a Hardware PC Emulator called supercharger which would allow me to run both the Atari and PC at the same time. I learned more about DOS and someone at Uni showed me about FTP, usenet, IP addresses, the JANET network and it is here where I interested in the Internet (1990 & 1991). At University in my second year our IT lab had HP UNIX workstations with 21" colour monitors, 32mb workstations & RISC processors running HP UNIX with X Windows. These machines were like heaven where it is only recently with Linux I have been able to find a comparison..... I could email, download, compile a program, print, write or run a script all at the same time and it just worked! I had my usual fun of locking the machines up but they certainly opened my mind to what a workstation could do.
When I built my first PC I was looking for an OS. In 1993 the only choices were OS/2, Windows or Deskview X. I tried Linux but I neither had the time or resource to learn about it and when I needed to run Ms Office back then I was severely limited. In 1994 I became a Windows 95 (aka Chicago) beta tester and at one point had linux, os/2, dos and windows 95 all on one machine. I event tried to boot windows 95 under an OS/2 Dos VM although could not get it working! As I was used to running several OSes at once I could not use OS/2 as it caned the machine when I ran Windows Apps, I could not stand DOS/WIN311 as it was a fudge (or elephant on top of a mini) and I couldn't get on with the interface restrictions so and I couldn't find anymore information about DeskView X - so Windows 95 seemed the choice. Although Windows 95 was not powerful enough for me. Typically I would use a wordprocessor for assignments and whilst we were writing and testing our code I would have to do screen shots. MS word at this time could not cope with me. I would take a typical screenshot in DOS - two colours and have to reduce the colour depth from 24 million colours to two so it could cope with the picture in word. When you have several of these it grinds to a halt. I tried MS Word for NT (a 32 bit app) as I thought more address space would be available for the application to run. It worked in Windows 95 just but was slow. When you include the fact I would use word indexing, contents, header formatting and frames Word would just collapse. Back then and still now I am of the opinion word is bad for long documents when you begin to use all of its features. I originally used to use Wordstar 4 in my pc emulator (remember CONTROL KK or CONTROL KB?) and would leave a blank page, print out my screenshot and physically glue it to the paper of my assignment. This worked, whereas word would grind to a halt. I found it is easy to use word for text editing than use a dedicated DTP (my first being Fleet street publisher on the atari) to do the layout.
Part of the beta testing program was also to test Office 95 which was better than word for NT and I loved the inline spell check. So it was windows 95 for the next few years until I discovered NT 4 workstation. This through my work took my to NT server, W2K, W2k3 and even had the opportunity to use IBM AIX and build two IBM RS6000 H70 for my company. Again, the latter is a great OS that just works even allowing you to resize disks online whilst people are using them - technology of which WINDOWS has only seen in the past few years whereas I am talking about this being available in 1997.
My next venture into Linux was 2006 where I tried to convert myself from my Windows blinkers to linux 100% but it failed because I was expecting too much. Because I had two mobile phones S60 and Windows mobile (private & work) I would exclusively sync with Outlook to PST folders. I would not keep anything on the exchange server purely using it as mailbox for email. Linux has never really had any good syncing clients and it wasn't until a year later after switching my XP desktop to lighter version that I made the switch to ubuntu. I chose this over Fedora or OpenSuse because I wanted something to work out of the box but would allow me to roll up my sleeves and get under the hood if I needed to. I decided to VMWARE my pc using VMConverter. I then ran ubuntu and my old pc under VMWARE for the next 18 months until I took redundancy. This in itself was an "age of discovery" as I had the best of both worlds where I gradually stopped using the full blown MS APPs and used Open Source alternatives such as OpenOffice, Firefox and openproj etc.... There were some issues with formatting in OpenOffice but as longs as I accepted I would never get 100% compatibility I could work with it. I never really switched off my vmware PC until I left work because of the syncing to outlook and still to this day it is a bug bear of which I will post another time.
Linux whichever flavour now runs on all of my machines as the default OS. I use opensuse 11 on my server as I find it is more suited for a file server. Things for example using YAST show more options and allow me to do more detailed things whereas Ubuntu hides them from the users. I know this is a generalistic view but I want to be able to set more detailed options inside of a GUI as it is usually quicker (not always) then CLI. Whereas I use ubuntu on my desktop and laptop as it has just the right level of configuratbility I need for a desktop OS. I also have a MID (mobile internet device) a nokia N810 which runs maemo linux which I use for browsing and other things where I don't want to boot a full PC. Lastly, there is the EEE PC which started the linux adventure off at home. This is now running Easy Peasy Linux (ubuntu) which is used as a device midway between my laptop and N810.
My laptop is a Dell Inspiron 1525 with upgrade hard drive to 320gb and upgrade ram to 3gb. Vista lasted two days and was wiped off after installing ubuntu. I run VMWARE of XP and W2k when needed as I use MS Money but have not found a decent Linux alternative. I have tried GNU CASH etc... but cannot get on with them.
Lastly, my data is in the cloud where I use this for my diary/contacts/email. I don't use google calendar and contacts as it has a long way to go. But as mentioned earlier I will blog about this sometime later because whilst it is a bug bear, mobile tech is still a passion for me.
In conclusion, I still laugh at a comment in an interview that I had where I was told I did not come over as technical.
However I will let you decide what you think.
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