About Me - Theodore Zacharia

I've been programming since the early 80's and from 1988 for the large, US based, global IT company . In 2008 EDS was bought by HP and became EDS, an HP Company ... until 23rd September 2009 when EDS ceased to exist, it became HP Enterprise Services and later . In 2014, after many cuts in HP, eventually I was also lucky to escape whence I joined TTP as a Lead Consultant and specialist in Performance Engineering. TTP merged with C4T to become .

A personal timeline can also be found here.

After Enterprise Architecture, why do I now do testing?

Information Technology

School

I've been interested in IT from a very young age and at my school we had access via a Teletype terminal to a PDP-11 computer hosted at Middlesex Polytechnic (a University now). I did not own a device to take a photo of this, I had no camera and mobiles had not been invented in 1978 but this (or something very similar) is what we were using, an ASR33 Teletype Terminal. I had a lot of fun coding on the terminal, mostly in BASIC, saving and loading my work via the 7-hole paper tape. There were no actual I.T. courses in those days but I was studying Physics O Level as well as an Additional O Level of Electricity and Electronics and I got on well with my teachers for both so I was given access.

Work

I've been lucky enough to work in many countries, for extended periods in some cases including the US, Canada and on the European continent (living in Belgium for over 5 years). You can see a selection of my travel photographs here

I've worked on many platforms including Mainframes, UNIX, Solaris, Linux, Windows and others and in many environments, languages and tools including C, C++, C/C++ with SDK and MFC (on the Windows platforms), VisualBasic, PowerBuilder, Oracle Forms and Developer/2000, Forte, Java, JavaScript, HTML, PHP and Perl as well as various shell scripting languages including bourne and korn shell. I've worked mostly on enterprise scale, multi-national, large user community, client/server systems. I've worked with all the major databases including IMS DB, DB2, Oracle, Sybase and Informix as well as SQLServer and Access for smaller jobs.

 

I've worked in many industries for many customers including:

I've completed many personal projects too, most usefully writing an IPTC tagger in Perl to enable me to easily tag the thousands of pictures I have taken. Of course I code all the JavaScript on my website myself, including the cool expanding menu and the dynamic page generation in the Trips (and Photos) sites and the By Key pages which take the IPTC tags and generate the menu (and page) via JSON type objects. Look at my software site for the source code and runtimes of IPTC and tzsh respectively.

I'm ex-RAF (Royal Air Force) but my flying is now relegated to flight sims.

CV
Something serious now, my Curriculum Vitae 		Résumé

Hobbies

I am also into fast cars, photography, painting (mostly in oils and watercolor), watching SciFi movies on the big screen (and taking part in my head), and horse riding and Wing Chun Kung Fu. See here for a selection of pics of me doing stuff. I'm especially into my kids, playing and exploring the world with them.

Fine Art

I've continued my interest in art, and as a picture is worth a thousand words I will not bore you with any, so just go and look at my art here by tag cloud or here by medium.

Photography

I've been into serious photography since 1982 when I bought a Minolta X-700 and 3 lenses as well as a tiny Hanimex 35ee with the funds for my first term at University (see here for a selection of my photographic equipment). A great investment as the X-700 still works and takes great photographs. I am a profuse photographer and take pictures of anything and everything, since switching to mostly digital in 2003 I have saved a considerable amount of money in developing costs - thank you digital. You can see a selection of my photographs by equipment here. Initially my photography was simply for recording my travels and taking reference photographs I could later use for drawing and painting projects, but as my time for fine art decreased my photography became more of an art in itself rather than just a tool.

Being a programmer I of course have written a utility to add IPTC tags to all my images. This works at a command line level which mean I can basically do one, tens or hundreds of files in just one command. This was very useful when updating directories which had related content, but it also has add, update and replace modes to add extra information on each specific picture. For more see here.

Riding

I took up riding (English not Western) in September 1998 because a friend wanted me to go riding when I visited her in Switzerland, and I thought it might be a good idea to at least be able to get on a horse without getting killed, but I really caught the bug and ended up riding more than my friend. I took a school based BHS (British Horse Society) Preliminary and Novice stage Dressage tests (my teachers idea, not mine) and found to my surprise that I really enjoyed it (once it was over). I've also started jumping fences (this is my idea) - cool! In 2004 I finally rode western (in Argentina) and found it to be much more relaxed and easier than I imagined, the horses there were very well trained and forgiving.

Wing Chun Kung Fu

In September 1999 I finally took up Kung Fu, Wing Chun to be precise. I've always enjoy watching Bruce Lee movies but never really thought I could learn such an art. My sister Helen and I are now keen students of Wing Chun which is a great fighting system, our teachers are very good, and it is having the side effect of getting me fit again. Check out their website at UKWCFKA if you'd like to know more. I train mainly at my local kwoon which is at the London HQ in Southgate. Being a photographer I took this photo of our 2007 Advanced class

ATC, RAF & Early Work

From 13 to 22 years of age I was in the Air Training Corps, the Air Cadets, No. 2473 (Southgate School) Squadron, rising to the rank of Cadet Warrant Officer (CWO) and in my last 2 years there we won the Middlesex Wing Drill Competition held at RAF Uxbridge. I stayed in the ATC during my time at University reading Physics at UCL (University College London).

 
I then spent a short time in the Royal Air Force rising to Flying Officer but found the job to be mostly man management which I was not interested in. I was however, very good at programming and even wrote an interception algorithm on a programmable calculator (RPN) we used "in field" for quick checks, so with the end of the Cold War, the world of Information Technology seemed a sensible and exciting field to enter.

I did so via the Oil Industry where I worked for NL Baroid as a logger and computer operator. After passing the prerequisite training I did a two week hitch on the semi-submersible exploration rig Glomar Arctic One, working 12hrs on 12hrs off, nights first week then days second. This was well paid and the food on board was of the highest standards, but I have never liked the sea and one 40 foot wave which we encountered settled my mind for a life onshore.

In January 1988 I joined EDS and have never looked back. In 2008 EDS was bought by HP and I became an HPer, the corporate culture was indistinguishable to EDS and the corporate videos and training were the same but with a different logo.

Life in General

On the 25th of July 2004 I married Angela, we moved into our new house after the honeymoon in Thailand. For more info see here.

 

Late 2008 Angela gave birth to an 8lb 1oz beautiful baby boy whom we named Leonidas Constantine after the King of Sparta, of the 300 fame and my father, respectively.

 

And late 2010 Angela gave birth to a 7lb 1oz beautiful baby girl whom we named Katerina Sofia after Angela's mother and wisdom, respectively.

 

More Info...

Here is some information about my home computer systems.

 

TheoWare International (author of tzsh) is building a new HQ, bigger than global, it's intergalactic. It's still in the early stages of construction. Here's a view of the project as it stands now.

That's enough about me, here are some interesting and possibly even useful links: <a href="olinks.html">Go to links</a>

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