Software

Ok, it’s true.

Although I consider myself a teacher, I am not an academic.

Some of the engineers I work with design computerized flight control systems such as those that would be considered “fly by wire” or that fly autonomously with no human in control. As such, I’m always looking for ideas on how to make software that is more and more reliable.

Ah, blogging!

The SSID of my personal WiFi hot spot is a type of rare fruit, broadcast is turned off, and the WPA2 passphrase is a complete sentence including punctuation and proper capitalization from one of Thich Nhat Hanh’s books.

… are in the computer you are looking at right now?

You probably don’t know the Red Baron Operating System, “R-Boss” (RBOS). It was named for a strip bar in Houston Texas and it carried billions, probably trillions, of dollars of credit card authorizations for American Express – including long after they lost the source code for it.

… and this is bad because?

I’m switching from “Old cranky that overheats” running Winders XPat to “New and obscure that isn’t supposed to do that (overheating), at least not until I really need it” computer running Windows 7.whoKnowsWhat.What.What.

Back when 300 baud dial-up was new – yeah, that’s a long time ago, all right – we had a “guest” login to a mainframe where a friend worked. He had administrative privileges and, being the generous sort, we were “in”.

There is a country, which I will allow to remain nameless, that receives a lot of “off-shoring” of software engineering from US companies. I teach a fair number of engineers from that country and, for whatever reason, I have to say they seem to be grossly under qualified. By and large, in the classroom they ask few questions – that could be a cultural thing, I admit – and in the labs they have more problems than others in following the detailed instructions – again, that could be a cultural issue.

My first programming job was for the American Express Space Bank at the end of the 1960s. “Space Bank” was a relatively short-lived hotel and motel reservation system run by the credit card people.

Once upon a time, there were three RTOSes named VRTX, pSOS and VxWorks.