First Post

I have been working with computer software for a fairly long time. In fact, my first encounter with computers was with an ICL mainframe (with the processing power of probably one of today's powerful desktop PCs) as an intern doing an unpaid summer job entering COBOL code into punch cards on an offline data entry terminal. I remember being fascinated at the thought of telling a computer in English (well almost) what I wanted to do and having it do it tirelessly, over and over, without making a single mistake. Lots of time has passed since then, and I am now a server-side Java and web application developer, and while I am no longer surprised by the tremendous innovations in our field in the last 2-3 decades, I continue to be fascinated by how much we have been able to push the envelope in respect to what a computer can do.

I used to have a free website in geocities before it got taken over by Yahoo!. In previous lives, I have been a software customer support person and marketing support for a computer hardware company, a de-facto Unix system admin and Informix database administrator (there was no one else), an Infomix 4GL developer, a real Informix DBA, a C and then Java developer. I have picked up various technologies along the way, and my website was my cheat sheet for interesting stuff I did and which I may want to do again. Some of them were re-implementations of cool things I had already done, after I had left that company, because I felt that with the benefit of hindsight, I had a better design the second time round. However, the website was hard to maintain, since I was essentially writing a blog before blogs were invented. And since I was lazy, it rapidly fell into disuse.

I have been told by some of my visitors that some of the content of that site were useful to them, so I plan to port over some of the content from that site to this blog. I also plan to add articles about things that have been floating around in my head since then, assuming I havent forgotten all about it. Hopefully people here will find it interesting.

So, welcome to The Eye of the Storm.