Greetings all,

My name is Eric Ashley, obvs. I'm just a professional geek spending my days 
thinking about information security in a world of automation, where one minor 
parameter could expose your corporate data to open access by anyone, literally 
in the world.

I'm also spending time testing out various fully homomorphic encryption 
libraries with an eye toward building automated tools to encrypt a data set so 
that large batch processing can be done on rented hardware without the data 
ever being unencrypted on the HPC. Think of the monthly, quarterly and annual 
batch jobs that get run to generate sales commission reports and payments or a 
large General Ledger reconciliation.

I started my programming life (among so, so many other lives I've lived) on 
Radio Shack Trash-80, er, I mean TRS-80 Model II's, while hanging out in the 
local Radio Shacks in Natchez, MS. At my brief attempt at Uni, I was a vocal 
performance major (that's opera to laypeople) and realized that as a baritone I 
would always be scrounging for parts, since there are no well-known baritones. 
I mean if Plácido Domingo switches from tenor to baritone and quickly back to 
tenor again, what hope is there for normal mortals without his kind of 
connections. While at uni, I got my own TRS-80 Color Computer 2 (CoCo2) and 
delved into OS/9 a bit. I was the first Music Department student to be granted 
a computer center account so I could print. It was truly a dark age.

I picked up a bit of dBase II before I left uni, and also worked a short stint 
as a hospital based EMT. Then while working a job connecting high school 
students with summer job/training opportunities brought me into contact with a 
4GL RDBMS called DataFlex. After some training at Data Access Corp, the 
DataFlex publisher, I landed a job in their Information Resources department 
before transitioning to Tech Support/Training. While doing tech support and 
teaching advanced training courses, I was teaching myself C in my spare time. I 
eventually moved to the Product Development department, porting the DataFlex 
character-mode language from MS-DOS to 27 Unix variants on all types of 
hardware, from small micros to large minis that look like pairs of current size 
racks.

My Linux days started with Slackware on 3 floppies, from which I cobbled 
together rudamentary firewalls to utilize the then current 1200bps 
downlink/300bps uplink modems of the day. After I left Data Access, I started 
with Cove Systems, a DAC customer that publishes a distribution management 
vertical written in DataFlex. There I continued work connecting the DataFlex 
language to the FairCom Server and wrote interconnection API's for software 
that did not yet have access APIs, including credit card processing, 
interactive voice response, a job scheduling system and email generation. At 
Cove, we settled on SCO Unix before they were purchased by IBM, then 
transitioned to Red Hat. I switched over to Fedora at Core 2 after I left Cove. 
I've been happily building Fedora boxes ever since, with the occasional 
instance of Debian, Ubuntu or Raspian.

I have commercial experience writing in C/C++, Java, Javascript, bash and its 
predecessors csh and ksh, Python, Perl and DataFlex. I've done a bit of work 
with Visual Basic and C# under duress.

I'm afraid I'm one of the people who loath Windoze and think Apple OSs have 
never been the least bit intuitive. On most any Unix or Linux box, or Android 
phone, I can quickly make the device do whatever task I desire. Windoze and 
Apple products are anything but easy to me. It is like both go out of their way 
to make anything but the most basic task as difficult as possible. OS/2 2.1 was 
a major improvement in multitasking over Windoze back in its day. I do realize 
though that I don't think the same way as most people, and that can lead me 
down certain different paths. What I think is a simple, easy to understand and 
use interface, other people often consider daunting to grasp. At DAC I taught 
one beginner course and we all realized that it wasn't my bag. I literally have 
no recollection of what first approaching a computer was like, so I just don't 
relate to beginners in a way to that I help them. I'll explain something three 
or four ways, including some reasons why you might want to do it a given way, 
after that I tend to start losing my patience.


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