blog [mike atlas]

Starting January, I’ll be working for Basis Tech in Cambridge. Their office is a two-minute walk from Alewife on the MBTA, so I won’t have a car this time around and I can’t begin to say how happy I am to not have to pay for gas and insurance. I’ll be doing development and programming projects.

My new apartment is right next to Fenway Park (I can see Jillian’s from my bedroom window). Unfortunately it looks like I’m about .3 miles from the nearest greenline T stop, Hynes Convention Center, and .4 miles to Kenmore. Northeastern’s a .75 mile walk from the apartment. You can check out the location with Google Maps. For coop it will be nice not needing to be on campus, but I’ll probably have to get a bike once summer two semester starts and I’m back in classes again. The most exciting part about my first apartment is that I will be moving my furniture from home into it - my queen size bed, my glass desk, my glass shelves, my nice lighting…all the things that I can’t have in an on campus apartment, not mention the fact that I can paint my walls a color other than eggshell. I’m so tired of white walls and posters trying to cover them up.

I feels like I’m making a big step towards being independent - for real.

Here’s a press release from Pyxis Mobile (my last coop) that talks about their newest product version, mPlatform 5.0.

All the talk of connecting to “disparate data sources” in the MDM relies heavily on the work I designed and developed, which was named the PAF: the plugin application framework. It’s so rewarding to read about something that I contributed so much to - be so talked up so strongly in a press release!

In two years im probably going to do a major evaluation of my finances and decide between one of the following things:

a) Travel, see the world, put of being a full time working stiff to get a better appreciation of the world and what I want to do with the rest of my life.

b) Lay out my career goals and decide if going to graduate school is something that is necessary to achieve them.

c) Work full time for a year or two to save up some money such that I can make a better decision about a and b.

At a party last night, the girlfriend of a friend of mine kept telling people when I walked by her, “mikeatlas.com, I’ve seen that shit, it’s hot. mikeatlas.com, talented guy right here people. Photos, art, this kid’s crazy…” and so on. Kinda funny, but I kept saying to no avail, “But…all that art and web design is old, and not really a very good indication of who I am and what I do with my life right now. The most important part is really just the link to my resume!” But those words were drowned out by music and yelling and I realized nobody really cared about it anyway. Perhaps I should consider changing the focus of my site to promote who I am and what my objectives and interests are, rather than to draw attention to some of the webpages I’ve designed or the digital art I did back in high school.

I did some updates to my overall site design, replacing the cartoon with a real picture of me, as well as integrating in an iframe for my playlist instead of it spawning a new window. I suppose the last thing to do is integrate the blog into the theme so this doesn’t need to be in a new window. I probably won’t find time to bother doing that though.

For the first time since I’ve installed WordPress as my blogging tool on this site almost seven months ago, I started recieving comment spams to my entries. I know WP tries its best to hide known URLs but I’m sure there’s some web spiders out there crawling for default WordPress comment text in html pages, so it probably was inevitable that I’d end up being spammed eventually, but at least it took this long so far.

Anyways. I added a simple requirement for comments (for the few real ones I ever recieve anyway) that asks you to enter the word “notspam” into an additional input field. I have a feeling it should jam up any commentbot. Hopefully this is probably a good enough preventitive measure to prevent comment spam here, as I highly doubt and comment bots are sophisticated enough to adapt to unique input fields on specific blogs without human interaction to do the work.

I have a feeling my blog URL is now going to be shared on a “hit list” of WordPress blogs to spam (these things are traded just as gigabytes worth of email addresses are bought and sold on the black market to spammers). At least I know I should be able to implement a simple, dynamic input box requirement, such as simple math questions, like “Answer to X + Y = ?”, where X and Y are some random integer, and the form post handler will check to see if the user did the correct math. Thanks to Pete Lumbis for the idea.

Note to self: parse my resume for any of these words:

Aggressive, Ambitious, Competent, Creative, Detail-oriented,
Determined, Efficient, Experienced, Flexible, Goal-oriented,
Hard-working, Independent, Innovative, Knowledgeable,
Logical, Motivated, Meticulous, People person, Professional,
Reliable, Resourceful, Self-motivated, Successful, Team player,
Well-organized

They are Résumé-Killers: Words or phrases with empty meaning in resumes that don’t add any value to your description.

I was doing some homework today for CSU480 - Systems and Networks. It involved me writing a C program that spawned a new process. I also had some questions to answer about threading and synchronization. It led me to poke around Wikipedia, which can be just as distracting as playing a video game - as many others know, you find yourself opening link after link to related articles; such that when you decide to stop, you are no longer reading something in wikipedia that has much of anything to do with what you came looking for initially.

Anyway, I happened to “stumble upon” this particular article, titled The Free Lunch is Over: A Fundamental Turn Towards Concurrency in Programming, by distinguished programmer, Herb Sutter.

I read it from start to finish. You know, my professors keep dropping the question, “Can Moore’s Law really continue to hold up?” And the answer seems to be: Definitely not, and it won’t hold up much longer in the near future and I speculate by the end of my undergrad studies this will be even more evident. Sutter points out that chip designers are going crazy coming up with optimizations to improve performace that go beyond the simple physical downsizing of transistors and the increase of cache size on CPUs. Things like hyperthreading and branch prediction, or multi-core chips are what are being used to get small (in comparison) increases in performance.

Recently (9/27/05), I went to a speech hosted by NEU:CSS:ACM and ECE:IEEE given by Shweta Kabadi, an architect for Intel Corporation. In her introduction and at various times of her monologue, she dropped hints about how “Intel is moving towards ‘platform solutions’”, or, as I’d like to interpret it, “away from CPU architecture”. It seems like Intel knows what’s up. They’re aware of how increasingly difficult it has become to speed up the raw Mhz of CPUs! If Intel is “moving more towards x and y”, then it is an indirect admittence that Moore’s law is soon going to stop holding up for them. If that be the case, then profits are at risk, so obviously they have to start looking in other directions to increase profitablity.

Another thing that I found particular exciting about Sutter’s article is the impetus that the focus on future performance of applications really will depend on better programmers and not better hardware. I know that threading is relatively a new concept for me and I’ve only recently coded a few multi-threaded applications, but it is somewhat reassuring when he compares the learning curve undergone to understand object oriented programming to be about as steep as concurrent programming is. It gives me confidence that I will have to have a good understanding of threading, because future application performance leaps won’t be made with hardware; they’ll be made in software.

So I’m ready to learn. I’m confident that if concurrency in applications is the next fundamental important paradigm that we need to embrace, which, now I strongly believe to be true after reading this article, I’m excited to learn it better and perhaps set myself ahead of my peers by excelling in it sooner than later. If processor performance is going to plateau, then my role as a software developer plays much more importance in the future demand for higher performce applications.

BoingBoing posts about Northeastern University

After Xeni Jardin faked alumnus status at Stanford to get access to The Facebook, she explored and came up with commentary on the site. Asking to be added as her friend, I did so as a faithful BoingBoing reader should do. I have a feeling she did look at my profile, as well, since her article in the LA Times about the Facebook mentions the Oregon Trail interest group I belong to on my Facebook account (that exists only at the NEU Facebook). In any case, Northeastern’s documentary video on the Facebook also made a special mention. Check it out.

Spotted this in the parking lot at work yesterday.
A co-worker guessed that they must work for Constant Contact, an email marketing company down the hall from us.

I have approximately 2 days left to finish my job here at Pyxis Mobile. I have worked full time here for almost 9 months now, 6 of those months counting towards co-op, the other 3 my last summer break of college. Over that time I have worked for the Professional Services, the Development, and finally the Quality Assurance teams. When I say worked full time, I was probably in the office for 10 hours a day on average, but I often played a bit of foosball or did personal things on the internet in that extra hour or more that I stayed in the office. I’ve taken only one week off in this entire stretch, heading down to Myrtle Beach with my girlfriend to catch some rays.

I was washing my hands in the bathroom today, and I looked at my reflection in the mirror, and experienced a disconnection from my physical self that I have only felt once before, also while looking in the mirror. I was shocked. Who is that in the mirror? Is that me? For a few moments, my ego didn’t recognize the physical form in which it resides. That’s my face? Shortly after returning to the office, I was talking to one of my coworkers about something. In the back of my mind, all of a sudden, I began to wonder, “Whose voice is that coming out of your face?” I was discomforted by the thought and hurriedly told myself that I am me.

So what the hell just happened? My best guess is that I’m starting to lose my “individual ego”, or my “sense of who me is” as a result of the drastic reduction in personal time I have alone with my thoughts. My life’s been flying by and haven’t had a chance notice that I’m changing too.