My degree is in Physics from Imperial College (1967). I then spent 12 years at CERN, and 12 at SLAC (Stanford). My final job was at DANTE (see www.dante.net) where initially I was involved in Operational planning. Then one day in 2000 a colleague came over and said: "I'm leaving the company in 30 mins, you get the company's Assets and Operational Database!" Although I'd been writing software since 1965, because of a shift in focus in the early 90s, I'd done nothing at all with web technologies. I'd heard of mysql, but not PHP or JavaScript. So I got a 30 minute tutorial on all three, with me going "Ooh" and "Ah" periodically. The Assets DB hardly existed then, but ended up being a valuable operational tool by the time I retired two years ago.
In essence, I know what I do today by poking around the web, asking Qs in various newsgroups, and looking at a number of books. But as it was more or less a part-time activity, I'm sure I've ended up with a number of gaping holes in my expertise. I'm hoping that this forum will be a safe place to ask possibly naive but pertinent questions (unlike some newsgroups). At the moment I'm working on two things: 1) I purchased a 68000 single board computer and am writing a little multi-tasking kernel for it in assembler. Not quite sure what this has to do with JavaScript though. 2) I've been writing an e-mail client using JavaScript to present to the user, PHP to communicate with mail hosts, and SQLite for the database aspects. I started this because Eudora is getting a bit old and is no longer supported and I like its features. Also, JS, PHP, SQLite, and apache are all included with OS X, so I had everything I needed. I've used this exclusively for my email for a year now, but as I add features I still bump up against confounding issues now and then. -- tim -- To view archived discussions from the original JSMentors Mailman list: http://www.mail-archive.com/jsmentors@jsmentors.com/ To search via a non-Google archive, visit here: http://www.mail-archive.com/jsmentors@googlegroups.com/ To unsubscribe from this group, send email to jsmentors+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com
