Author Topic: Hi from Saratoga, California  (Read 2502 times)

saratogaWX

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Hi from Saratoga, California
« on: March 22, 2012, 09:22:18 PM »
Looks like I forgot to do this after joining the forum  :-[

A bit about my past:  I'm a life-long unabashed nerd since grade school. In high school and college, I carried my trusty Keuffel/Esser Log-log-duplex-decitrig slide rule in leather case dangling from my belt and a full nerd-pack in my shirt pocket. Nerds really rule!

I graduated from UC Davis (BSEE) in '69, married '70 to Holly, and we have two children, Kimberley-35, Ryan-31. Holly and I are now 'empty-nesters', and kinda relieved. Neither child nor my dear wife share my enthusiasm for things technical (sigh.), and have no interest in the weather observation.

I started programming while at UC Davis, but with card-decks and WATFOR, it wasn't a great success. I worked at Fairchild Semiconductor from '69 - '81 and Intel Corp. from '81-'04 and retired in Feb, '04. Along the way, my interest in programming went from Tymshare Basic, Xerox Fortran and Macro Assembler, TSO, MVS Macro Assembler, SAS, PL/1, Turbo Pascal, Visual Basic, BSDi shell, Perl, and now PHP. I had the happy circumstance to ride the wave of computing development from Mainframe, to PC to LAN to WAN to Internet and then to Security Architecture. I got started in web design/use in the early 90s with Mosaic and NCSA web services. My group and I helped put Intel on the internet with web/firewall services, and proxy servers so Intel employees could have reasonable personal use of the internet. Much of the programming I did was glue-ware for log-crunchers and management systems for the firewall complexes we designed. From 1999 to 2003, I led firewall engineering for the (now defunct) Intel Online Services group - a webhosting venture on a massive scale. Built 4 big datacenters (east/west coast US, UK and Japan), but when the Internet bubble burst, so did our operation. Spent the last year at Intel as chief architect for enclave security (lots of Powerpoint foils, not much programming).

After retirement in 2004, the new Davis VP weather station offered a chance to keep my programming hobby alive by writing scripts to present data on a personal weather website.  In 2006, I redesigned the website and began offering PHP scripts freely so other enthusiasts could possibly use them to enhance the presentations on their weather websites too.

I'm really pleased that folks have found some of my scripts useful too, so I continue to share them freely!

Now I've joined here to make WeatherCat the 7th supported weather software package to drive the popular AJAX/PHP templates (which have over 600 sites listed around the world).

Thanks to Stu for inviting me to embark on the WeatherCat project!

Best regards,
Ken
Ken True/Saratoga, CA, USA main site: saratoga-weather.org
Davis Vantage Pro Plus - FARS, Boltek-PCI/NexStorm, GRLevel3, WD, WL, VWS, Cumulus, Meteohub, WeatherSnoop, WeatherCat
Free weather PHP scripts/website templates - update notifications on Twitter saratogaWXPHP

elagache

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Welcome Ken! (Re: Hi from Saratoga)
« Reply #1 on: March 23, 2012, 02:18:32 AM »
Welcome aboard Ken and Thanks again!

Certainly appreciate all you are doing for WeatherCat!   [cat]

As soon as I can get some stuff off my plate I want to start trying out some of your goodies!  [bounce]

Welcome aboard and hope you'll be getting some nice rain this weekend!!  [rain2]

Cheers, Edouard  [cheers1]

WCDev

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Re: Hi from Saratoga, California
« Reply #2 on: March 23, 2012, 05:31:30 PM »
Welcome to the forum Ken - as Edouard said, great job you're doing there  [tup]