Aussies Unite - A forum for any Aussie Aspies

Page 34 of 44 [ 703 posts ]  Go to page Previous  1 ... 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37 ... 44  Next

Oldavid
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 15 May 2010
Age: 71
Gender: Male
Posts: 704
Location: Western Australia

19 Dec 2014, 10:38 am

alisoncc wrote:
And here's me thinking WA stood for West Africa.
:P
But the Kiwis always get their vowels mixed up (one practically indistinguishable from another). Worstraya to them is translated as farthest Western parts of the West Island of New Zealand but the word and pronunciation has no equivalent in Kiwi.



tombell1986
Emu Egg
Emu Egg

User avatar

Joined: 17 Dec 2014
Age: 38
Gender: Male
Posts: 6
Location: Adelaide, South Australia, Australia

25 Dec 2014, 5:11 am

alisoncc wrote:
G'day mate. Alison from the Mornington Peninsula - Golfers Heaven.


Nice to meet you Alison, you might see me here from time-to-time. Haven't done any serious "foruming" in a few years since going to Facebook so I'm gonna see how I go here :)



tombell1986
Emu Egg
Emu Egg

User avatar

Joined: 17 Dec 2014
Age: 38
Gender: Male
Posts: 6
Location: Adelaide, South Australia, Australia

25 Dec 2014, 5:12 am

alisoncc wrote:
And here's me thinking WA stood for West Africa.

:P


Hah, I've never actually heard anyone use "West Africa" in common talk :)



Oldavid
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 15 May 2010
Age: 71
Gender: Male
Posts: 704
Location: Western Australia

25 Dec 2014, 7:02 pm

"West Africa" is fairly common now that Ebola is mentioned in the "news".



piecesofquiet
Emu Egg
Emu Egg

User avatar

Joined: 27 Dec 2014
Age: 36
Gender: Female
Posts: 1
Location: Longreach, QLD, Australia

27 Dec 2014, 11:53 pm

I'm from Longreach, QLD.



Oldavid
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 15 May 2010
Age: 71
Gender: Male
Posts: 704
Location: Western Australia

28 Dec 2014, 1:18 am

piecesofquiet wrote:
I'm from Longreach, QLD.
G'day maaate, ay.



alisoncc
Snowy Owl
Snowy Owl

User avatar

Joined: 16 Dec 2013
Gender: Female
Posts: 155
Location: Arrakis

28 Dec 2014, 7:29 am

piecesofquiet wrote:
I'm from Longreach, QLD.


I remember a story about Longreach heard when I was flying out of Archerfield. Apparently some newbie drove up there in a brand new Holden, and seeing some shade from a solitary tree parked under it, whilst wondering why none of the locals had taken advantage. When he returned some hours later, he found the roof of his brand new car suitably dimpled where the feral goats had stood on it to get at the leaves on the tree. :P


_________________
Rev Mother Bene Gesserit

Sent from my PDP11/05 running RSX-11D via an ASR33 (TTY)


LadyDaemontus
Butterfly
Butterfly

User avatar

Joined: 30 Dec 2014
Age: 25
Gender: Female
Posts: 15
Location: Australia

30 Dec 2014, 7:12 am

Near Armidale, New South Wales here!


_________________
You see Sweetheart, only psychos think about shoving a needle into your neck, seducing you than pulling your heart out of its rib cage <3

''I can be the villain to your whore~''


ImAnAspie
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 15 Oct 2013
Gender: Female
Posts: 7,686
Location: Erra (RA 03 45 12.5 Dec +24 28 02)

30 Dec 2014, 8:08 am

Hi,
ImAnAspie (Steve) here and I live in Sydney (Bankstown region) and I've always wanted to meet another Aspie.

I've just recently looked up a place in Burwood that meets once a month. I'm planning to go in the new year (but it's $40 a meeting).

I'd like to meet another Aspie but alas, I've not found one. I wear my Aspie T-shirt hoping someone will start a convo with me and I'll finally meet another Aspie but it's the same as when I used to be a member of 2600 and wore the t-shirt but no-one ever approached me and asked, "Are you a hacker?". All interesting shtuff but no one cares about me. I've come to believe I'm of no interest to anyone and no one cares!


_________________


Your Aspie score: 151 of 200
Your neurotypical (non-autistic) score: 60 of 200

Formally diagnosed in 2007.

Learn the simple joy of being satisfied with little, rather than always wanting more.



one-A-N
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 2 Mar 2010
Age: 69
Gender: Male
Posts: 883
Location: Sydney

30 Dec 2014, 8:43 am

ImAnAspie wrote:
Hi,
ImAnAspie (Steve) here and I live in Sydney (Bankstown region) and I've always wanted to meet another Aspie.

Hi, I live in the outer southern suburbs of Sydney, but work in the city.

Quote:
I've just recently looked up a place in Burwood that meets once a month. I'm planning to go in the new year (but it's $40 a meeting).

I might know that group. I went to a talk about the autism spectrum organised by a group at Burwood when an Aspie speaker from America was visiting Sydney a couple of years ago. Good event and met some interesting people there.

Quote:
I wear my Aspie T-shirt hoping someone will start a convo with me and I'll finally meet another Aspie but it's the same as when I used to be a member of 2600 and wore the t-shirt but no-one ever approached me and asked, "Are you a hacker?". All interesting shtuff but no one cares about me. I've come to believe I'm of no interest to anyone and no one cares!

If I saw a T-shirt with "2600" on it, I'd probably wonder "Does that person live in Canberra?" Anyway, I work in IT myself and have been programming for a long time. What kind of hacking do you do?



ImAnAspie
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 15 Oct 2013
Gender: Female
Posts: 7,686
Location: Erra (RA 03 45 12.5 Dec +24 28 02)

30 Dec 2014, 9:08 am

one-A-N wrote:
ImAnAspie wrote:
Hi,
ImAnAspie (Steve) here and I live in Sydney (Bankstown region) and I've always wanted to meet another Aspie.

Hi, I live in the outer southern suburbs of Sydney, but work in the city.

Quote:
I've just recently looked up a place in Burwood that meets once a month. I'm planning to go in the new year (but it's $40 a meeting).

I might know that group. I went to a talk about the autism spectrum organised by a group at Burwood when an Aspie speaker from America was visiting Sydney a couple of years ago. Good event and met some interesting people there.

Quote:
I wear my Aspie T-shirt hoping someone will start a convo with me and I'll finally meet another Aspie but it's the same as when I used to be a member of 2600 and wore the t-shirt but no-one ever approached me and asked, "Are you a hacker?". All interesting shtuff but no one cares about me. I've come to believe I'm of no interest to anyone and no one cares!

If I saw a T-shirt with "2600" on it, I'd probably wonder "Does that person live in Canberra?" Anyway, I work in IT myself and have been programming for a long time. What kind of hacking do you do?


These days, not much. In the old days, I used to take down porno sites through DDOS. TCP/IP is my homeland. I studied it to the point where I even got into the personal lives on Bob Kahn, Vint Cerf and John Postel.

These days, I'm more of a white hat (or maybe a grey hat). I'll find holes in people's security and leave a "calling card"! They've got a certain amount of time to fix it or I'll threaten to publish it - depending on how disgusting the site is, I may or may not.

I'm no script kiddy. I can program in several different languages including LISP, COBOL and a heap of other archaic languages as well as VB/VBA/VBS, Pearl, BASH shell programming, DOS scripting, you name it, I've done it. My editor of choice is Vi although I don't hate and can use emacs.

I'm fluent in Regex...

My God I feel old! I've done everything from build computers up from empty boxes to full on UNIX systems. I've configured my own DNS servers, DHCP servers, HTML servers (of course), SMTP, IMAP, POP3. I've done it all!! !

I'm a C/C++ programmer for UNIX, mostly FreeBSD these days but in the old days when Sun Microsystems used to still be alive, that was my heyday! SunOS/CDE was THE BEST!! ! Oracle killed that Special Interest for me!


_________________


Your Aspie score: 151 of 200
Your neurotypical (non-autistic) score: 60 of 200

Formally diagnosed in 2007.

Learn the simple joy of being satisfied with little, rather than always wanting more.



alisoncc
Snowy Owl
Snowy Owl

User avatar

Joined: 16 Dec 2013
Gender: Female
Posts: 155
Location: Arrakis

30 Dec 2014, 2:47 pm

ImAnAspie, sound like a bit of a Newbie to me. :P Currently resident South of Melbourne, and retired.

Run http://www.aspergies.com Drupal based, on a CentOS webserver in my lounge room using Annex M on a naked Internode line, use APC and Memcache.

I have been around computers almost as long as computers have been around. Had my first job interview with English Electric (EE) at Crewe in 1968. EE later went on to become ICL. Didn't get the job as I wasn't fast enough doing octal arithmetic in my head. So went back to aeroplanes.

By the early 1970's I had acquired a commercial pilots licence and was flying sanctions-busting electronic kit into Rhodesia, along with evacuating the wives and children of ex-pats from some of the more dangerous areas of Southern Africa. Did a few trips for a company called Protea PNI, flying Interdata computers and Tektronix 4010 screens into Salisbury, and got chatting to the guys involved.

After a few particularly hair-raising flights decided that flying puddle-jumpers around Southern Africa was not a good long term life prospect, and joined Protea PNI as a sales engineer. The nasty stuff hit the fan when the Americans discovered that Protea PNI had sold Foxboro process control systems to the South African Govt for their nuclear research facility at Pelindaba. I subsequently applied to Tektronix in Australia for a job in 1975. Moving here late 1975.

By 1979 I was an applications engineer with Digital Equipment Corp (DEC) in their Tech OEM division in Sydney. At the 1980 DECUS (DEC Users Society) conference in Sydney I presented a paper comparing DEC's DDCMP and IBM's SNA communication protocols. Met with a bunch of students from Wollongong Uni afterwards, drinking coffee late into the night, and talking. I believe the guys later became the Wollongong Group who did significant work in developing the Winsock TCP/IP interface - the Winsock DLL. If running a Win 7 box you are probably using winsockhc.dll to read this. I probably helped light the fire at that late night session in Sept/Oct 1980.

Also knew Dave Cutler, whom Bill Gates stole from DEC to develop Windows NT. The NT philosophy was based entirely on DEC's Micro VMS design. If you have formal qualifications in IT then you would have heard of Yourden and Constantine the fathers of structured programming. I have one of the earliest editions of their book "Structured Programming" with hand-drawn diagrams, and my notes in the margins. And still have a 1973 DEC PDP/11 peripherals handbook that lists core memory in 32KB chunks and these fantastic, for the time, 5MB hard drives.

Built my two webservers from scratch (1 x production, 1 x development), with Gigabyte motherboards, Intel CPU's and RAM, plus Western Digital hard drives. Then built the CentOS (Linux) op sys from distributions, plus Apache, PHP, MySQL, etc. Also adding Postfix, Dovecot and Squirrel as an email server. It would be a disaster if senile dementia took over and I forgot what it all does. <grin>

Alison


_________________
Rev Mother Bene Gesserit

Sent from my PDP11/05 running RSX-11D via an ASR33 (TTY)


ImAnAspie
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 15 Oct 2013
Gender: Female
Posts: 7,686
Location: Erra (RA 03 45 12.5 Dec +24 28 02)

30 Dec 2014, 5:19 pm

Wow! You've certainly been there!

Can I ask you a question? When you said I "sound like a bit of a newbie", was that sarcasm or were you being genuine?

I started programming in high school back around 1979 on an Apple ][C

I've also been into computers ever since they've been available to the general public.

My first computer (apart from my TRS80 Model 1 hand held) was a Z80 based computer that used the TV as a monitor and I saved my programs to audio tape using a Hanimex tape recorder.


_________________


Your Aspie score: 151 of 200
Your neurotypical (non-autistic) score: 60 of 200

Formally diagnosed in 2007.

Learn the simple joy of being satisfied with little, rather than always wanting more.



alisoncc
Snowy Owl
Snowy Owl

User avatar

Joined: 16 Dec 2013
Gender: Female
Posts: 155
Location: Arrakis

30 Dec 2014, 7:06 pm

ImAnAspie wrote:
Wow! You've certainly been there! Can I ask you a question? When you said I "sound like a bit of a newbie", was that sarcasm or were you being genuine?


Neither, just being silly. Note icon immediately following.

I cut my teeth programming literally punching holes in paper tape for a boot loader for a PDP11/05 in, I think, assembler. Used to toggle the switches on one of these beasties to load the paper tape.

Image


Also played extensively with Tektronix's Plot 10 Fortran libraries. All of which was an awfully long time ago. By 1979 I was an Appl Eng with DEC. On one site, remember checking the load-bearing strength of the floor of the computer room to make sure it would take the extra 32Kb of core we were planning on installing in a PDP11/34. Core was very heavy, taking two people to lift.

When Aussat was formed from OTC and they built the two ground link stations, they installed PDP11/44's running RSX11-M to manage the links. I had significant involvement with the project.

After DEC I moved into mainframe software - did a spell as an IMS and IDMS DBA. (DBA - Database Administrator) IMS and IDMS were Codasyl hierarchical databases, pre-relational. Bit manipulation in C was all the go then. RAM and disk were very expensive, so each bit in a 16 bit word constituted a flag. We could do magic things with just a single word. <grin>

Done a fair bit of C++ stuff, but nowadays just PHP and SQL to keep the brain active. Really like Drupal as a Content Management System for websites. It's fun to play with.

Alison


_________________
Rev Mother Bene Gesserit

Sent from my PDP11/05 running RSX-11D via an ASR33 (TTY)


one-A-N
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 2 Mar 2010
Age: 69
Gender: Male
Posts: 883
Location: Sydney

31 Dec 2014, 12:15 am

You both sound slightly more hardcore than me, but I could follow all the details.

I don't do Cobol, but can (or could once) write simple Fortran IV code. I learned Basic on an Apple IIe and slowly added more languages - C especially (without the plus signs for a long time), but even PL/1 (well, it was on one of the machines I was programmming...) and I still like to play with assembly language. I have programmed on a mainframe, a mini-computer, and on more than one "micro-computer" (as they used to be called). I still like to learn new languages - e.g. scheme and haskell both look interesting ...

These days I mainly do (or rather design and supervise) web development, as well as doing some tutoring. In my hobby time I like playing with computers doing useless things, like trying to invent a *really* simple operating system that no one would ever use, or a really simple compiler, etc. I guess this reflects my desire to break things down into the simplest core concepts, which is why I also like tutoring - teaching a subject by starting right at the beginning and adding features one by one in a logical order. My home and work computers are both Linux boxes, so I do know my way around network services and have set up a variety of servers - proxies, web, database, etc. I have supervised network administrators, so I understand the bigger picture reasonably well, but I am glad to have staff to do the actual grunt work most of the time.

I love regex, and like playing with PostgreSQL. I am not really a computer science person, except self-taught. I actually come from the social science and humanities worlds - again, tutoring reflects that interest (an Aspie who is theoretically interested in other people, but can't read their body language and social rules!). I am not into vi or emacs, preferring the newer simpler editors (no one in particular, though jedit and mcedit are frequent). I do like grep and use it a lot for checking code and logs - I have generated quite a few reports with little more than a sequence of greps and wc -l in a shell script, and then a quick prose write-up of the results. Alternatively I'll do log analysis using SQL - complete with regexes where useful.



alisoncc
Snowy Owl
Snowy Owl

User avatar

Joined: 16 Dec 2013
Gender: Female
Posts: 155
Location: Arrakis

31 Dec 2014, 3:49 am

One-A-N, like your Tux avatar. Went through quite few Linux variations for my webservers before settling on CentOS. CentOS is a community distribution of RHEL - Red Hat Enterprise Linux. It is so incredibly stable, secure and free.


_________________
Rev Mother Bene Gesserit

Sent from my PDP11/05 running RSX-11D via an ASR33 (TTY)