"Every man dies. Not every man really lives." - William Wallace
This page tries to provide some information about what I am presently doing. This includes information about my job and my current "free-time" activities. For more information on my current activites you can hop on over to read my blog.
In my free time, I enjoy reading, exercising, tinkering with technology, gaming, spending time with friends, and "vegging-out."
I love to read novels where espionage or the military are involved. Authors like Tom Clancy, Robert Ludlum, and WEB Griffin have been my favorite up to this point. I also enjoy science-based fiction novels by people like Michael Crichton. And in an effort to expand my mind, I also read non-fiction books on subjects like technology, business, history, pyschology, and the economy. I have some blog posts about the books I have read and a huge list of books here and in my Amazon Wishlist that I want to read.
I enjoy having an active lifestyle that includes basketball, biking, and golf. I also enjoy exercising but do it for the health benefits for the most part. In the last couple of years I have started running and have yet to find it fun despite its obvious health benefits. I have recently gotten back into a regular schedule of playing basketball and lifting weights. I have also recently started a new hobby, boxing. At this point, I am just using it as a way to get into great shape but might continue as a fun, and possibly a self-defense, activity. Maybe my friend Adam will get his wish and get to punch me in the face.
I am currently a Research Associate working with the SAnToS lab in the Computing and Information Sciences department at Kansas State University. My title really doesn't convey what my job truly entails so let me explain it in more detail. I am part software developer, part researcher, part project manager, part office manager, part supervisor, part system administrator, part marketing, part sales, ... well, you get the point. I have a lot of diverse duties and at times it seems like I am helping to run a small software company.
I am currently the lead developer (or sole developer and project manager) of the Cadena project. I took over this job when Jesse Greenwald moved on to greener pastures (Garmin). So if you find bugs in the code, they are likely mine but I will blame Jesse for them.
Recently, I have changed my focus from core development of Cadena to focus on how we can apply CBD (component-based development) to the development of sensor networks. This work is in conjunction with Gurdip Singh, Dan Andresen, and their graduate students. So I am learning all about nesC, TinyOS, and motes. With the help and guidance of the real sensor network developers, I developed a set of plugins for Eclipse that work with Cadena to provide support for developing TinyOS applications. Kind of a fun project that allowed me to build a compiler (using ANTLR) and an Eclipse source code editor.
In addition to the sensor network tasks and the Cadena project, I am working on understanding SparkADA (a language based on ADA built to make verification easier) and building an Eclipse plugin. At this time, I am able to leverage an existing open-source editing framework called Hibachi to do a lot of the work and developing plugins that interact with the labs analysis framework.
Since we are still primarily a research lab, I have also had to spend a great deal of time reading, understanding, and applying techniques that are on the frontiers of current practice. And every once in a while I help write papers and attempt to get extramural funding.