Re: common Jobs for VI Programmers: GUIs, DSP, DB, Asm

Hi list,
A bit of a collective reply for everyone. A huge amount of great input in a very short time, thanks a lot. There have already been several interesting points:
Yes, one can create Guis and you are right, the visual fine tuning can easily be left to someone sighted, I'm not at all embarassed to ask for help in such a situation. I feel quite confident designing interfaces as long as they are made up of relatively standard controls. But as soon as we're talking about, what works well with the mouse, putting in much more graphics and direct manipulation, and relying on metaphores things get harder. I've been using the Mac a bit and there are quite a number of clever mouse usage, sightee, and graphical innovations I would never have been able to figure out on my own, mostly because I virtually never use the real mouse if another interface does exist.
database programming got a big mention and rightly so. I'm not very good at math but at least the basics of database optimization appear to be a lot of knowing the basicsa of how to compute latencies for indexed databases and the particulars of the database vender in use, which comes with experience.
Good that the main frame stuff also got mentioned. Assembler or some sort of embedded system's programming in C is somewhat fascinating as well. I seem to enjoy the higher level languages like Perl and Ruby for the most part, but for a long long time, have had a yet unsatisfied nack of really finding out and most importantly taking the time to learn assembler. But I would like to learn that in a modern post Pentium and WIndows world, not DOs or LInux, since I don't really have time to configure a Linux system right now. Are there any ways you can practice system's or embedded programming on your own? MObile phones might be a bit of a stepping stone, there's X86 assembler and of course the heavy duty stuff like WIndows driver development, maybe some day.
One of the primary motivators for me to try to learn math has actually been audio DSP. I'm a synth nut, from the user point of view, though have always tried to understand as much as possible about the effects and components of a synth be it analog, FM or sample playback. I also know the basics of VST and MIDI on wire. The biggest hurdle for me in audio DSP seems to be the math, in contrast dealing with MIDI is straight forward, intuitive and doesn't really require any higher math. I have not tried any DSP specifics, but it just seems to me, based on logic and formal computation courses, that I canot easily get my head around the truely abstract math that starts out totally formally from axioms and moves from the abstract to the concrete, rather than vice versa. I've heard from various sources you need good discrete math skills, FOurier transforms, matrices, Complex numbers and a variety of other things, too.
a sighted Linux friend of mine is much more math oriented. He is right now on a Uni course which does image processing formally based on matrices and convolution, and told me that most of that stuff is fairly mathematical but applies directly to audio as well, not just image processing.
The academic career, accessibility related ressearch, is something I've also been seriously considering and might try that, too, but I'll ask more about that stuff in another thread when it is current, after having gratuated first. 

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With kind regards Veli-Pekka Tätilä (vtatila@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx)
Accessibility, game music, synthesizers and programming:
http://www.student.oulu.fi/~vtatila/ 
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