I go down rabbit holes on Wiki following internal combustion tech for some reason.
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An example are the 2 story tall oil tanker diesel engines that burn crude at like 60RPM, or rotary/Wankel engines and such. Sometimes I think I should have gone into some field where I was building physical things. I mean, I picked up software when I was little because I didn't have an income to keep supporting building frankenbikes and circuits, nor would they let me weld, but I had a computer. I build stuff. It's what I do. I'm a coder of circumstance. Why do you code?
Check out my IoT graphics library here: https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx And my IoT UI/User Experience library here: https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix
I like to automate things for myself or others that otherwise might be drudgery. That and it can entertain me for hours and hours per day as I'm obsessive.
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honey the codewitch wrote:
Why do you code?
I'm too lazy to be a farmer, too clever to be a banker, and too honest to be a politician. What else is left?
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows. -- 6079 Smith W.
Adding, I don't want to get political regarding what's happening where you live so this is all I'll say: I'm glad to see you well and hang in there. :sigh:
Check out my IoT graphics library here: https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx And my IoT UI/User Experience library here: https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix
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Thanks. I appreciate that because I tell myself I'm good at it as a pep thing, but I often don't believe it, except right after I've done something really cool. :laugh: I do like that I've avoided all the financial debt and baggage that comes with a formal education but there are holes in my knowledge. And the culture in embedded seems to lean heavily on credentials, and I lose a little sleep over that. "You don't belong in this arena" gets too much play in my head. :~
Check out my IoT graphics library here: https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx And my IoT UI/User Experience library here: https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix
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An example are the 2 story tall oil tanker diesel engines that burn crude at like 60RPM, or rotary/Wankel engines and such. Sometimes I think I should have gone into some field where I was building physical things. I mean, I picked up software when I was little because I didn't have an income to keep supporting building frankenbikes and circuits, nor would they let me weld, but I had a computer. I build stuff. It's what I do. I'm a coder of circumstance. Why do you code?
Check out my IoT graphics library here: https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx And my IoT UI/User Experience library here: https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix
because i was not a good enough physicist or mathematician upon completing BA Mathematics and MS Physics and because my MS thesis was a FORTRAN code and because my "advisor" at IIT laughed at me when i informed him i wished to enter a EE BS program having previously completed said programs elsewhere . he insisted i enroll in EE MS program . nonsense . i would have been lost . also because my physics instructor in undergrad suggested i enroll in an MS Physics program . i was happy pushing buttons on IBM System 3 at the time until i got the stupid idea of applying for a technician job at an engineering firm which i was accepted to having answered by quite the coincidence the very same technical interview question i posed to myself only the week prior .
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OriginalGriff wrote:
I was ten;
I was eight! *fellow kiddie coder fist bump*
OriginalGriff wrote:
'd never seen a computer, let alone used one; I had no idea at all what was involved in software. And neither did anyone else around me, there was no-one to even ask!
Right? Heck, sometimes I still feel like there's nobody to ask!
OriginalGriff wrote:
The closest my school or public libraries came to books on computers was this
I had the benefit of a small amount of material at public libraries, plus periodicals a little later on like CUJ.
OriginalGriff wrote:
But I hated being cold and wet, I hated physical effort. So "indoor work with no heavy lifting" really sounded good!
SAME! :-D
Check out my IoT graphics library here: https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx And my IoT UI/User Experience library here: https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix
Wow, had to think back. It was summer break and I was in fifth grade. The school was offering special summer programs. My family was struggling to make end's meet and so dad was working extra hours and weekends. Summer vacations were not even thought of (maybe a day trip to a fair or the Jersey shore). There was a computer course offered by one of the large computer companies of the day (I think it was DEC). The cost was low enough that we could afford it. It turned out to be a course in Machine Level Language programming. We covered the logical parts of the computer (arithmetic, logic, control, input, output). We learned the binary language of the opcode instructions. How to structure a solution to a problem as a series of input, process, output blocks. How to code branches by calculating the number of bytes to jump to reach another part of the code. This was real head scratching ones and zeros stuff, but hell, what did we know. We were just kids making a machine do things. If was fun! The person teaching the course was the head of a research division located in a business park about an hour from our school. So as a treat (for the last class), he arranged to have a van pick us up and take us to the research facility to get a tour of the latest machines they were working on and to bring a small program we wrote (limited to no more than 100 steps of machine code) to be run at the facility. While he took us on a tour of the latest machines (big bulky desk like machines that had attached drum storage that looked like a refrigerator turned on it's side). These machines could do word processing, spreadsheets, accounting journal entries, and other business functions without the need for a bulky mainframe. They were on the bleeding edge of technology. He then took us to a special part of the building where they had an old vacuum tube computer in a display museum. He crossed his fingers and had the old computer powered up.(tubes had a tendency to fail regularly). The machine had 4K of memory and a punched tape reader and teletype output. The operator used switches on the front to load the paper tape reading program (about a dozen commands). While we were touring an assistant had keyed our programs into the paper tapes. I was nervous as they took my program on tape and fed it into the reader. It read half of it and then stopped. The operator took the tape out, reentered the reader program through the switches and tried again. This time it read the entire tape. The tubes in the machine seemed to flicker a bit and the telety
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An example are the 2 story tall oil tanker diesel engines that burn crude at like 60RPM, or rotary/Wankel engines and such. Sometimes I think I should have gone into some field where I was building physical things. I mean, I picked up software when I was little because I didn't have an income to keep supporting building frankenbikes and circuits, nor would they let me weld, but I had a computer. I build stuff. It's what I do. I'm a coder of circumstance. Why do you code?
Check out my IoT graphics library here: https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx And my IoT UI/User Experience library here: https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix
honey the codewitch wrote:
Why do you code?
I watched Gemini and Apollo launches when I was little. Somehow I knew I didn't have The Right Stuff to be an astronaut. I was fascinated however by the views of Mission Control. All the panels with buttons that did Important Things. I wanted to learn how to do that.
Software Zen:
delete this; -
An example are the 2 story tall oil tanker diesel engines that burn crude at like 60RPM, or rotary/Wankel engines and such. Sometimes I think I should have gone into some field where I was building physical things. I mean, I picked up software when I was little because I didn't have an income to keep supporting building frankenbikes and circuits, nor would they let me weld, but I had a computer. I build stuff. It's what I do. I'm a coder of circumstance. Why do you code?
Check out my IoT graphics library here: https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx And my IoT UI/User Experience library here: https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix
honey the codewitch wrote:
rotary/Wankel engines and such.
Then no doubt you'd be interested in what this company is creating: LiquidPiston | Reinventing the Rotary Engine[^]
The difficult we do right away... ...the impossible takes slightly longer.
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honey the codewitch wrote:
rotary/Wankel engines and such.
Then no doubt you'd be interested in what this company is creating: LiquidPiston | Reinventing the Rotary Engine[^]
The difficult we do right away... ...the impossible takes slightly longer.
That's interesting. I assumed rotary was dead tech outside of prop planes just because it needs a lot more development before it's competitive with traditional piston engines in road cars. And road cars are going electric, which frankly is lower maintenance and potentially better performing than the equiv gas car pound for pound. So I wonder where this tech will go.
Check out my IoT graphics library here: https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx And my IoT UI/User Experience library here: https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix
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An example are the 2 story tall oil tanker diesel engines that burn crude at like 60RPM, or rotary/Wankel engines and such. Sometimes I think I should have gone into some field where I was building physical things. I mean, I picked up software when I was little because I didn't have an income to keep supporting building frankenbikes and circuits, nor would they let me weld, but I had a computer. I build stuff. It's what I do. I'm a coder of circumstance. Why do you code?
Check out my IoT graphics library here: https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx And my IoT UI/User Experience library here: https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix
1970 last year of school. They took us to a vocational guidance show and at one stall there was an IBM golfball typewriter printing Mona Lisa. I couldn't believe it. I stuck around and got a chance to play tic-tac-toe with the computer and also saw the golfball do a Noddy act nodding its "head" up and down and round and round. I was hooked. I never saw the rest of the show. I still have an IBM golfball on my desk and I still earn my living coding 53 years later. Never regretted it and I always remember a quote which says find a job you enjoy and you will never work in your life.
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An example are the 2 story tall oil tanker diesel engines that burn crude at like 60RPM, or rotary/Wankel engines and such. Sometimes I think I should have gone into some field where I was building physical things. I mean, I picked up software when I was little because I didn't have an income to keep supporting building frankenbikes and circuits, nor would they let me weld, but I had a computer. I build stuff. It's what I do. I'm a coder of circumstance. Why do you code?
Check out my IoT graphics library here: https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx And my IoT UI/User Experience library here: https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix
Notwithstanding I share your interest in weird engines, I first got the bug, to coin a phrase, at school - I'd have been 12 or 13. Read up books, used the school's timeshare terminal to learn a dialect of BASIC to make it do things, then went off in 1980 to Uni, to flunk a course in Electrical engineering, having been accepted as an apprentice by EMI in 1979. Learnt a teensy bit of FORTRAN on that course. Had to get a job to make ends meet, so took a job at a small local company assembling specialist calculators. Fast forward a few years and I'm now troubleshooting them with a 'scope and I have an assistant who is doing an OU course in computing, and gives me a copy of UCSD Pascal. I start writing programs to emulate the financial calculators we're selling - I'm building "things" again. Then the company decides this might be worth pursuing and we hire a very mathematically adept programmer (with whom I'm still friends) in the mid 80's. He suggests we drop Pascal and go C based, which we do. Late 89 we both leave and join a software house which writes server based financial data delivery and calculation software. We're building "things" that talk to each other. Early 90s the company gets in financial trouble and some of the team including me are hired by one of their customers. We're building bigger "things" that talk to each other around the world. And I'm still there, building "things" and also building tiny things with Arduinos and so on from time to time for fun. A lot of this is "making things do things" satisfaction. Which feeds in to my current hobby, amateur theatre, where we make really quite big things do things for the entertainment of others. Still like engines, though ...
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Everything I built as a kid was a bit rubbishy because I didn't have the tools or materials to build professional-looking stuff. With code, I could build stuff that looked as good or even better than the professional efforts. PS - I "invented" the Deltic engine when I was about fourteen and then realised with huge sadness that it was impossible - one pair of pistons would always be moving in the same direction as each other. I still think that the Napier solution to that problem is one of the most imaginative pieces of engineering ever. There's an hypnotic animation at http://www.3d-meier.de/tut16/Napier/Ani1.html <°}}}>«<
Thanks! Your link tags are encoded, but it's easy enough for me to copy them into a browser. :)
Check out my IoT graphics library here: https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx And my IoT UI/User Experience library here: https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix
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honey the codewitch wrote:
Why do you code?
I watched Gemini and Apollo launches when I was little. Somehow I knew I didn't have The Right Stuff to be an astronaut. I was fascinated however by the views of Mission Control. All the panels with buttons that did Important Things. I wanted to learn how to do that.
Software Zen:
delete this;I can relate to that. At my current employer some years I met up with one of the New York office's developers, a knowledgeable "grey beard" if you will. Over beers we chatted about our backgrounds. Turned out he'd been a programmer on Apollo, working on the flight computer software.
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Everything I built as a kid was a bit rubbishy because I didn't have the tools or materials to build professional-looking stuff. With code, I could build stuff that looked as good or even better than the professional efforts. PS - I "invented" the Deltic engine when I was about fourteen and then realised with huge sadness that it was impossible - one pair of pistons would always be moving in the same direction as each other. I still think that the Napier solution to that problem is one of the most imaginative pieces of engineering ever. There's an hypnotic animation at http://www.3d-meier.de/tut16/Napier/Ani1.html <°}}}>«<
The deltic is a wonderful piece of engineering. I can still hear, in my mind's ear, the sound of the locomotives on the East coast main line. When I was at school, I drew up a sketch of an inline 4 cylinder engine where the four crank pins were 90 degrees apart. My tech master said it would never work; the vibrations would shake the engine apart. Yamaha seemed to make it work with the cross plane engines such as in the R1 ...
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An example are the 2 story tall oil tanker diesel engines that burn crude at like 60RPM, or rotary/Wankel engines and such. Sometimes I think I should have gone into some field where I was building physical things. I mean, I picked up software when I was little because I didn't have an income to keep supporting building frankenbikes and circuits, nor would they let me weld, but I had a computer. I build stuff. It's what I do. I'm a coder of circumstance. Why do you code?
Check out my IoT graphics library here: https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx And my IoT UI/User Experience library here: https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix
My high school guidance counselors didn't -- as in didn't provide any guidance. OTOH, my brilliant math teacher acquired funds to purchase a couple of Commadore PET 8K computers, and I discovered I liked coding and was good at it. That set me on the path to where I am today. Since then, I've learned I'm good at woodworking, plumbing, wiring, and other practical skills, and I enjoy most of it. However, coding has yet to require me to delve into a muddy, spider-infested crawl space, so I keep coding.
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An example are the 2 story tall oil tanker diesel engines that burn crude at like 60RPM, or rotary/Wankel engines and such. Sometimes I think I should have gone into some field where I was building physical things. I mean, I picked up software when I was little because I didn't have an income to keep supporting building frankenbikes and circuits, nor would they let me weld, but I had a computer. I build stuff. It's what I do. I'm a coder of circumstance. Why do you code?
Check out my IoT graphics library here: https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx And my IoT UI/User Experience library here: https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix
Everything I built as a kid was a bit rubbishy because I didn't have the tools or materials to build professional-looking stuff. With code, I could build stuff that looked as good or even better than the professional efforts. PS - I "invented" the Deltic engine when I was about fourteen and then realised with huge sadness that it was impossible - one pair of pistons would always be moving in the same direction as each other. I still think that the Napier solution to that problem is one of the most imaginative pieces of engineering ever. There's an hypnotic animation at http://www.3d-meier.de/tut16/Napier/Ani1.html <°}}}>«<
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An example are the 2 story tall oil tanker diesel engines that burn crude at like 60RPM, or rotary/Wankel engines and such. Sometimes I think I should have gone into some field where I was building physical things. I mean, I picked up software when I was little because I didn't have an income to keep supporting building frankenbikes and circuits, nor would they let me weld, but I had a computer. I build stuff. It's what I do. I'm a coder of circumstance. Why do you code?
Check out my IoT graphics library here: https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx And my IoT UI/User Experience library here: https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix
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An example are the 2 story tall oil tanker diesel engines that burn crude at like 60RPM, or rotary/Wankel engines and such. Sometimes I think I should have gone into some field where I was building physical things. I mean, I picked up software when I was little because I didn't have an income to keep supporting building frankenbikes and circuits, nor would they let me weld, but I had a computer. I build stuff. It's what I do. I'm a coder of circumstance. Why do you code?
Check out my IoT graphics library here: https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx And my IoT UI/User Experience library here: https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix
As a kid I had two main obsessions: books and computers. By the time I was 10 I knew I wanted to be a programmer and writer. I'm also really into oddball tech and I spend a lot of time reading about that kind of thing too.
honey the codewitch wrote:
rotary/Wankel engines and such
That's an obsession of mine as well, along with vintage watches (especially the oddball ones, I have a whole collection of Accutrons). I drove an RX-7 and RX-8, I'm still sad about the demise of rotary sports cars.
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An example are the 2 story tall oil tanker diesel engines that burn crude at like 60RPM, or rotary/Wankel engines and such. Sometimes I think I should have gone into some field where I was building physical things. I mean, I picked up software when I was little because I didn't have an income to keep supporting building frankenbikes and circuits, nor would they let me weld, but I had a computer. I build stuff. It's what I do. I'm a coder of circumstance. Why do you code?
Check out my IoT graphics library here: https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx And my IoT UI/User Experience library here: https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix
I compromised. I loved drawing and writing all kinds of fantasy...but none of that certifies a salary. So I became a computer engineer. Compromised by doing videogames... I soon discovered there was one thing that frustrates me more than writers block or not knowing what to doodle next...my source code mysteriously not compiling XD I can be a nazi about clean and elegant C code (throw in as many comments as you want, but you must be mindful of every kilobyte you waste in the executable)...but I think in the end, I still hate coding. It reminds me just how human I am and how totally inept I can be talking to this insanely inept and expensive calculator in front of me.
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An example are the 2 story tall oil tanker diesel engines that burn crude at like 60RPM, or rotary/Wankel engines and such. Sometimes I think I should have gone into some field where I was building physical things. I mean, I picked up software when I was little because I didn't have an income to keep supporting building frankenbikes and circuits, nor would they let me weld, but I had a computer. I build stuff. It's what I do. I'm a coder of circumstance. Why do you code?
Check out my IoT graphics library here: https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx And my IoT UI/User Experience library here: https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix
I was in my senior year (1978) of college learning to be an electrical engineer and I started reading Byte magazine. The articles on micro-processors were quite interesting so I decided to build a computer (z80 CPU). Bought an s100 bus case with back plane, power supply, CPU card and a display card (attaches to the TV). I wire wrapped a 4K RAM card and a dual serial port card. I had no programming language, only a simple monitor program (called Zapple). All of this was finished the day after my last final. I now started learning how to program the z80 (by the numbers) and spent the next 3 weeks learning the instruction set. When I got to my first job they asked me if I'd be will to work in the test department as opposed to where I originally hired for and I said yes. I figured I really didn't know squat and was going to learn something no mater where they put me. Well, low and behold, the test group manager found out I had my own computer and asked me if I wanted to work on a microprocessor controlled smoke detector tester. Was basically asking me if wanted to do my hobby at work! I ended up doing embedded programming for my whole career (retired now).
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An example are the 2 story tall oil tanker diesel engines that burn crude at like 60RPM, or rotary/Wankel engines and such. Sometimes I think I should have gone into some field where I was building physical things. I mean, I picked up software when I was little because I didn't have an income to keep supporting building frankenbikes and circuits, nor would they let me weld, but I had a computer. I build stuff. It's what I do. I'm a coder of circumstance. Why do you code?
Check out my IoT graphics library here: https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx And my IoT UI/User Experience library here: https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix
Why do I code? Because I get to design & build something that does a task that I want and need. For me it stated in 1959 with what was billed as a computer guided multi spindle drill press. It was a stretch to call this computer guided as the instructions were a inch wide paper spool that had holes punched in it to tell the drill what to do. The only reason I got the chance to manage this machine was because all the lathe operators kept tearing the paper instruction. The older fellow who was to teach me liked that I was eager to learn. Side Story I ask him why Diebold sent him to Illinois to unlock a Vault Door. After he told me to keep my mouth shut he said. "Diebold hired him because he robbed banks and knew how to break into their Vaults" After a number of years working for a Swiss Pharmaceutical Company (CIBA) I decided to go to Pharmacy School I took an elective class in computer programming BASIC on a DEC Writer. I think it was a PDP 11 I was hooked and bought a Apple /// when I graduated My best teacher was Apple Dayton a user group that not only taught new user's but published a floppy disk almost every month
