Hello all, I'm donaldw.
Like many, I'm sure, I've come here for a long time before posting; mainly from Google search results for programming problems that I've had. I've been a member of several programming forums, but none really seem to be very useful and I end up posting my problem, figuring it out on my own, and posting the problem's solution all with not so much as an "atta-boy" or even a "I dunno." DaniWeb seems to be a lot more active and home to a larger knowledge base; I think I'll like it here. Obviously I've decided to sign up and start posting, hopefully I can help out with other people's issues and contribute and also find solutions to some problems that I encounter.
I have my BSCS and MSCS degree, both from an accredited engineering college at our state university. My Master's involved a ton of research involving artificial intelligence in a particular medical field culminating in 100+ page thesis and many tens of thousands of lines of code representing a case-based reasoning system related to said AI in medicine research. While I was earning my Master's I taught a undergraduate level college Java lab for 2.5 years (and Java is what I wrote most of my AI code in, both for general purposes as well as that for my research). I learned Pascal, C++, Lisp and some other languages in my undergraduate studies (including one or two I had to invent on my own) and self-taught myself Java (apparently well enough to teach that lab!), HTML, PHP and some other languages.
I now design and develop commercial software and web pages and build electronic hardware (PCBs, cabling systems, etc.) and occasionally code for fun
So, uh...Hi! :)