Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips Being a computer programmer does not make me a software engineer. Deep sigh before I begin. This is yet another post borne of frustration in talking with recruiters and hiring managers. Now that the sigh is out of the way. A computer programmer is not a software engineer. There. Wrote that bit. […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Over the weekend, I passed the test for CompTIA Security+ certification. It was probably the worst test I have taken since my junior year of college (back when we scratched answers on cave walls with colored rocks). Anyways, I memorized a bunch of stuff and passed a test. Perhaps this will come […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Thirty years later, the $50 computer is back. I think that is a good thing. In the early 1980s (yes, I am that old), we had the Sinclair Research made by Timex ZX81. It was a computer you could buy for $50. No, it wasn’t powerful, but it was a programmable computer. […]

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by Dwayne Phillips I earn a ITIL Foundation-level certification. For the past six or eight years I have heard of ITIL  certification. I didn’t pay much attention to it as I wasn’t an Enterprise IT person and did see a way that I could qualify for it. A recent look at it changed my mind. […]

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by Dwayne Phillips In which I try to understand why I own a computer. I bought my first personal computer in 1983. It was a Kaypro portable (luggable) that ran CP/M and had two new-fangled floppy disks that held 360KiloBytes of information each (a huge upgrade to the prior model that had 180KB floppies). I […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Want computer voting? Want it to be secure? Here is how to do it. Just about everyone in America today votes on some sort of computer. Now and then, someone writes a story about how someone discovered that their computerized voting machines are insecure and easily subject to election fraud. Here is […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Mankind is searching for that self-applying information so we can life the good life. Perhaps this is a silly fantasy, perhaps it is a dystopian future. Is this the singularity? Is this beyond the singularity? Consider this future. The computer mines information and doesn’t present it to a person, but uses it […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Some of today’s more efficient technologies are efficient because we are lazy. FORTRAN is an efficient programming language. The executable files are small. The programs execute quickly. There is a simple reasons why FORTRAN is an efficient programming language: the compilers were created at a time when computing resources were much less […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Google, Adobe, Chromebooks, and Creative Cloud take us yet again forward to a day long ago. Google and Adobe have just announced that we can run Adobe’s Creative Cloud on a Chromebook. Wow. I am not trying to be flippant. This is a big deal. You buy a $200 or $100 Chromebook […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Most of today’s “computers” are nothing but I/O devices to the cloud. Persons like me who use a computer that is in front of us are rare and disappearing. Here is a little, historical lesson on computing. A computer has three basic parts: processor memory input/output (I/O) That’s it folks. Nothing else. […]

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