Lists

So I'm a terrible blogger, both in updating and following through on what I've set out to accomplish here. But I have played in the World of Computery Things, so here's an update!

For my Computer Integrated Surgery class I've... almost made a robot move! I'm doubtful that I'll actually get to the "Moving Robots" stage, but I'm close to making a robot simulator move using hand gestures, so that's like the same thing, right?! I'm not sure how much of what I've learned from this project is applicable to the world outside surgical robots (or robots in general). CMake was pretty interesting, though. Code for that might be up on Bitbucket someday, depending on our license/disclosure agreement with the 3Gear peoples.

In Parallel Programming I've played with a bit of OpenMP, Java concurrent threads, Hadoop, MPI, and CUDA. I'm obviously not an expert on any of these, but I've gotten a taste for challenges of each tool/toolchain as well as the challenges of parallel programming as a whole. I'm not sure how much parallel programming I'll do in my new job, but I'm sure I've learned some pretty relevant skills. I've also done may of my assignments on Amazon AWS. I'm super excited at the prospect of having The Cloud (I'm not even sure whether I use that term ironically anymore) at my fingertips, and I have about $90 of unused compute time, but I'm not sure what I want to do with it. Still, Clouds are exciting!

In Other News, I've started re-playing Zoombinis! I loved the game when I was younger, and now I've realized it's truly edutainment at its best. The game was fun and (mostly) understandable years ago, and now it's still fun and can still be quite challenging. I encountered a puzzle that would be more fun to solve using a program than by hand, so I'm working with Yoshi to code up a solution. The problem and our proposed solutions might come in a later blog post (or we might solicit you, my dear reader(s?) for a better solution, as I'm pretty sure ours is currently sub-optimal at best).

So, that's a quick summary of What I've Been Up To. Perhaps I'll elaborate on more exciting things in the future.