Not long after my post this time last year I was layed off from my job as a robotics engineer due to the fact there was lack of work in the field. Although, luckily I was only unemployed for about a week and a half and started a new job as a Vision System Engineer. I am still currently employed in this position but with the way the auto industry is, it is hard to say how long I will be able to say that. For the past year I have spent much time at General Motors facitilies supporting vision systems. With these companies on the verge of bankruptcy it is a very scary time for myself as well as others. I am not the kind of person that just wants to sit around and collect unemployment, I would much rather be working on something invovled with technology that is new and exciting. Ultimately I think I would like to take my experience using robotics and vision systems and get involved in autonomous vehicles or autonomous robots. I have also been learning more and more about computer security and would like to be involved with that as well; for it is also rapidly changing and I believe with the shift to everything being digital will provide a much bigger role in society as time moves forward.
To try and keep up with the security field I started looking into becoming a Certified Internet Systems Security Professional (CISSP), to just add to my reptoire. I believe I could pass the exam but the only problem is you also are required to have 5 years work experience in the field to receive the certificate as well. So for me to break the barrier to entry, I've decided on the less streneous cerfitication, which is a Systems Security Certified Practioner (SSCP). The next test is in June, so I will be taking it then.
Over the past year I have also been trying to stay involved with many different meet-ups around the area. Sadly most of them take place in Ann Arbor (about 45 minutes from me), so the drive in conjuction with the many obscure and long hours I work make it hard to attend sometimes. But I will be moving to Ann Arbor shortly and am quite excited about getting involved with it. I have met quite a few people involved with Ann Arbor SPARK and A2geeks. One of them being Dug Song. Dug has been involved with computer security (including helping write SSH and dSniff) for a long time and is doing an exceptional job and getting the community involved and growing down in the ann arbor area. He is also very instrumental in getting start-ups and incubators going for Ann Arbor. He also helped start ArbSec (a computer security meet-up) which I have also recently started attending.
Amongst those things that I am doing, I have also applied the Singularity University. I was one of the 600 among thousands chosen from around the world in the preliminary application process. The university was started by Ray Kurzweil (a futurist and technology pioneer) as well as many other great thinkers and technology innovators. Among those 600 asked to submit preliminary applications, only 40 will be selected for the 9 week summer program. I am crossing my fingers that I am one of the 40 choosen. They are also doing something called 10^9 which is a project that all 40 students will be working on, they haven't announced what it will be, but I'm sure it will turn out to be something very cool. I believe given my background and interest in technology that I would accelerate greatly in the program. I'll find the beginning of May if I made the cut or not, once again........fingers crossed.
This past weekend I attended notacon 6. There were many interesting people there. It was fun to just geek out for the weekend and listen to many presentations and speeches given about many various aspects of technology as well as ways many people are hacking things to do what they want. The most interesting thing I saw by far was the augmented reality demo (See the picture below). He basically built a virtual reality environment for $200. I was quite impressed that a single person could do something like this and only reaffirms my belief that a technological singularity is coming.
As for technology outlooks, recently at drupalcon 2009 there was a call for semantic web integration into drupal 7 (via RDF). I'm glad to see a push for this technology, it is rapidly growing (google just added support for it). I was calling for integration of RDF support back in 2007 for my google summer of code project. Although it wasn't choosen I wish it would have been because I could have probably helped push intergration faster into drupal than it currently is. About a year ago I also wrote a blog post about the future of the internet. It's funny to see many of the things that have taken place since then, many of them becoming true. For instance the growth of the linux operating system. Many of the inexpensive netbooks have made rapid growth and it's very exciting to see someone using Ubuntu linux at a local coffee shop. Another thing I discussed in the paper I wrote for the greenphone grant that I worked on was the growth for mobile systems as a platform for posting content. This can easily be seen with the explosive growth of twitter in just the past 6 months alone. In that future of the internet post I also talk about mobile devices doing much more. I can confirm this because I have recently purchased a mobile phone with the google android operating system. With the phone I am able to control my desktop and steam videos from my server on my local network to the desktop. The operating system hasn't been around for long on mobile devices, only about 6 months now. But it amazing to see some of the applications for it. For instance I am also able to remotely connect to my server anywhere I have an internet connection. I can even remotely control my desktop! Someone is also currently porting the quake 3 engine to android as well. I am excited to see where mobile devices will be just in the next 5 years. Probably much more immessive environments as well as intelligent applications to help you be more productive.
As for the near future I wanted to attend Tech Now 9 this week but am unable due to work constraints. Although the following weekend I will be attending Penguicon. I'm very excited to move to ann arbor within the next few months as well and get heavily involved with the growing tech community that presently exist there. Although I tend to stay quite busy, I have also started snowboarding this year and love it, it definitely makes winter more tolerable for me, although now I am looking for to some nice weather to show up here in michigan. I will try and update my blog a litte more than once as year too.
Augmented Reality Demo
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