Generic Blog Update

Well as it’s been so long since my last blog entry, it would be remiss of me not to provide at least some sort of update on what I’ve been doing. When I last posted, I had just finished my final exam ever and was enjoying some well-earned time off. The end of university also marked the closure of two interesting projects for me:

The first of these was my fourth year project on algorithm visualisation which I undertook with David Olsen. I’ve briefly mentioned it in the past and will probably blog about it  (and hopefully do some more work on it) in the future. For now, you’ll have to accept the quick and abstruse description of our work as an algorithm visualisation framework; basically a library which instruments C++ programs with code that animates their dataflow during execution. And the programmer need not use special data structures or manually invoke drawing routines; it’s just standard C++ with STL and a couple of extra header includes. It earned us first prize in the Software Applications category. 🙂

I worked on the second project with David and Sutirtha Basak for our advanced graphics class. We developed a building sketch program which generates 3D models of buildings from 2D sketch input. Most of the credit goes to David whose model generation algorithm impressed our lecturer to the extent that he asked us to co-author a paper on it, which we submitted to an international computer graphics conference. My part of it mainly involved detecting the best-fitting line of symmetry in the user’s sketch and manipulating the sketch by reflecting half of it accordingly, to make it truly symmetric.

Since then, I’ve been doing a bit of work on my personal project, an MP3 tagging plugin for the Foobar music player. But the more important news is that I got a job as a software developer for a large company in NZ. In fact, I’ve been working there for two months now, doing web development using C#/ASP .NET and (battling with) the SharePoint platform. I’ve enjoyed my time so far and it has been an eye-opening experience, given that I was 100% an application programmer before starting. But I’ve been picking things up reasonably quickly, and it feels good to be contributing valuable work straight off the mark, despite how apprehensive I may have been about my knowledge (or lack thereof) of all things webby…

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