This is me!

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gordy

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#16046 21-Sep-2007 18:48

Hi!

My name is Gordon (J) Milne. I live in Christchurch and I work software.

My life path to NZ is as follows: Insch, Auchleven, Aberdeen, Warrington, Didcot, Reading, Watford, Wellington, Christchurch.

My work path is as follows: higher scientific officer, senior scientific officer, principle engineer, senior software engineer, technical manager, senior software engineer, consultant, software engineer, team leader.

My hobbies are reading SF, reading tech books, walking in the sun and pondering the lot that is our place upon this world. I need a hobby to get me out of the house. I am considering going to Toastmasters. I feel that I have a (pitifully) weak self-image which impinges on my self-confidence. I am a very capable person. I come across as confident but its all a front.

JAMMAN2110

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#87588 21-Sep-2007 20:30

Wow! Thats a really honest post.

Welcome to Geekzone!

Shankly

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#87595 21-Sep-2007 21:13

Hi Gordy,

It's a small world. I used to live in Didcot before I moved to NZ, and my Brother was in Reading. What did you get up to while you were there ?

gordy

13 posts

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#87598 21-Sep-2007 21:29

Didcot was a temporary move for me and my partner. She had a nuclear-related job at NIREX and I took the train, every weekday, to Burnham where I worked for the UK arm of a RTOS company called Microware.

After six months in Diocot, we moved to (far more) cosmopolitan Reading where she took the train to the City of London, and I continued to take the train to Burnham. Eventually, we got burgled and bought a house in Watford. We lived there until I shipped out for NZ in September 2000, she followed in December.

I found Didcot a tremendously boring place to live. Reading was far better. We wanted to buy a place in Caversham Heights but the mortgage would have killed us which is how we ended up in Watford. It was a mere 20 minutes from our nephew in Hemel Hempstead.

FYI, Jasper Fforde sets part of The Well of Lost Plots in the unpublished plot of "Caversham Heights"!

Shankly

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#87606 21-Sep-2007 21:49

Yeah, Didcot wasn't the nicest of places, but convienient for us as it was cheap and easy to get out of on the train, my wife commuted to London every day. But the place was full of small time arseholes, so we spent most of our social time in Oxford, Reading or London.

freitasm

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#87607 21-Sep-2007 21:50

Welcome to Geekzone!

Fossie

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#87620 21-Sep-2007 22:49

Welcome to Geekzone! Watch out for Jamman, he bites.

gordy

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#87645 22-Sep-2007 10:43

I can be pretty fiesty at times too.

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#87671 22-Sep-2007 17:08

Hey guys - welcome to Geekzone!

JAMMAN2110

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#87674 22-Sep-2007 17:16

Fossie started the biting war.. It's not my fault.. This time

jdbob

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#87724 23-Sep-2007 08:13

gordy: where I worked for the UK arm of a RTOS company called Microware.

I've still got a bunch of their manuals on my bookshelf although I haven't used a OS-9 computer in 5 or 6 years.

gordy

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#87772 23-Sep-2007 17:51

Well, I no longer possess an OS-9 manual. I moved out to NZ in September 2000 and haven't had any connection with OS-9 since. Those I left behind in the UK got caught up in the acquisition by Radisys. Most moved on.

It was a great product in its time. Unfortunately, the company gave up its heartland constituency when it moved into interactive digital TV. A lot of great ideas came out but they lost their place in industrial controls and pretty much lost their way. One of the things that really hurt was that buying OS-9 meant you had to buy their tool chain as well. It was good stuff but people do not like being forced into a single-vendor path. Many companies wanted Greenhills for the tool chain but someone else for the OS. With OPS-9 you had to buy both from Microware and this hurt them a lot.

I could write a lot more. The whole demise of Microware and OS-9 is still a fresh scar on my psyche. A great, understandable OS, was lost to all but those in the know.

OS-9 is still part of Radisys' plans. They have a cool demo of OS-9 and Linux running on a dual core processor. Os-9 hardly breaks a sweat supplying the data to Linux on the other core. Linux is, however, getting a bit stressed, but coping.

jdbob

43 posts

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#87856 24-Sep-2007 10:20

gordy: One of the things that really hurt was that buying OS-9 meant you had to buy their tool chain as well. It was good stuff but people do not like being forced into a single-vendor path. Many companies wanted Greenhills for the tool chain but someone else for the OS. With OPS-9 you had to buy both from Microware and this hurt them a lot.

In the 80's I wrote and sold OmegaSoft Pascal. At the beginning they didn't include a compiler with the operating system so you had to buy a compiler. A lot of Europeans (and a few Kiwis!) bought Pascal while C was much more popular in the states. Once Microware starting including a C compiler with the OS most people didn't bother with an alternative and that was the beginning of the end for my Pascal business.

Bob

gordy

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#87876 24-Sep-2007 12:19

Pleased to meet you JDBOB. I like the look of your blog. That train set is fantastic. Almost fantastic enough to get me to pick that (childhood) hobby back up.

Sorry to hear that OmegaSoft Pascal didn't make it. I had heard good things about it. With Borland's Pascal I thought Pascal had a chance to escape the classroom. However, the rise of C within the systems programming and electronic engineering environment meant that Pascal wasn't going to make it. A shame since C is little more than a high-level assembler.

These days I touch hardly any C/C++ and spend my days using Java. This is for a scientific instrument with a 1.1GHz Pentium-M inside it. In mostr cases (i.e. 99.9%) Java is fast enough. For all other cases we switch to C/C++.