I met him once. Right after Shoemaker-Levy 9 impacted Jupiter there was an event at the Mountain View Holiday Inn where he talked about it. I'd arrived a bit early (as an attendee), and while waiting for things to kick off I snuck out for a cigarette.
Halfway through it, there was Carl (f*cking) Sagan walking across the parking lot towards me! I dropped/stubbed my cig and told him how much I was inspired by 'Cosmos' and especially by the Library of Alexandria episode/ He said yes, it was really good and that was mainly down to his wife's work. And then he signed my cheap paperback copy of 'Cosmos' and headed in to the seminar.
I'm sure he could be a dick. But that certainly wasn't all he was.
Well, don't feel bad. I did the exact same thing, except I had the benefit of your post and its anscestor replies, so I wasted less time.
You don't have to be old -- we still use FTP all the time at my job. Of course, whenever we have a say we use some secure variant, but you don't always have a say (no matter how much you yell, grumble, sermonize about the dangers of insecure tech, etc).
Of course, you probably meant you feel old because "FTP" didn't immediately register to you as "Free To Play". Well, I can't help you there, because by that standard I guess I'm pretty old too.
Maybe he got more hardcore over time. I was (one of) his undergrads at UCL when he was a newly minted professor and I think he was one of the socks-with-sandals crew (vs sandals without, and those who wore regular shoes).
I’m a programmer with 30 years experience, looking for remote freelance or fulltime projects. My preference is C++/Objective C application development for Mac, Windows, iOS and Android, or indeed all at once.
* C++ developer since 1989
* Wrote and marketed the first 14.4K modem-usable VOIP application.
* Raw OpenGL-based game on Mac/iOS/Android.
* 'Tuplebase' a schema-less database engine (NoSQL I suppose) in 2002
* Lots of custom client/server stuff, as well as spec-compliant (e.g. HTTP, SSL, Jabber, AOL IM client)
* Generally everything I do is multi-platform (Mac/Windows/Linux, or Mac/iOS/Windows, but also Android).
* Full QuickDraw-style portable graphics engine, and windowing implementation.
* Filesystem-in-a-file (ZBlockStore_PhaseTree)
* setjmp/longjmp-based multi-threading implementation
* Developer of ZooLib <https://github.com/zoolib/zoolib_cxx> since 1992.
This is a good point but interestingly within Scotland (i.e. the target audience) the question doesn't need to be explicitly stated. People will have "Yes" (or "Aye") or "No" badges on their facebook profiles without any context.
It's probably good that they added the question in though as I'm fascinated by the responses outside Scotland!
Nope.
Actually turned out not to be such a bad thing as it forced me to rethink an implementation approach (using Dropbox APIs) that had seemed like a good idea, and was getting really sticky.
