Yesterday we had about 9″ of snow fall resulting in Schenectady issuing a snow emergency. It was my first and probably not my last!

LN3GS Software is now officially closed. All the software can be found here under Software. I will keep the LN3GS name and use it, but it is no longer a company.

With my new job starting in January, I decided that best course of action is to officially shutdown my software company LN3GS. The freeware that I created will be added to this site and this site will be redesigned to be more than just a personal research blog.

The REU program was my first experience doing research and it defiantly caught my interest. The research I did on identifying people through body measurements even got published, which I was excited about since I was only an undergraduate. It also lead to my first plane flight and the first time I really went out and did something that scared me to death. This experience really changed me and made a little more open and chipped away even more at my shyness. Another bonus was that thanks to the stipend I received, I was able to afford a summer in Tokyo studying Japanese.

Going to Japan made me really get outside of myself. I was in a foreign country surrounded by people who did not speak English and I had only 2 semesters of Japanese at UCF. I had to learn Japanese and how to not be shy at the same time. While there I really grew into myself and figured out who I am that I am capable of more than I limit myself to.

After coming back from Japan, I only had another couple of semesters at UCF for my Bachelors degree. During that time I used my new found confidence and outgoingness to make it enjoyable and eventful. It even got me noticed by my some of my professors, which led me into taking some graduate courses as an undergraduate and to eventually going back for my masters.

I have accepted a position as a Computational Intelligence Researcher at GE Global Research.

The last vestiges of my life in Japan are now over. The password for my University of Tokushima email address has been changed, so that I cannot access it. Although I do not believe it will happen, if you do happen to receive an email from davidb@is.tokushima-u.ac.jp it is NOT from me. My new email address is d a v i d At d a v i d b r a c e w e l l . c o m.

I have recently been playing more with Java and have needed to deal with HTML. I had written a web resource wrapper to get/post data to and from a web site. Instead of writing a bunch of utilities for different HTML scraping, I am looking into using the Jericho HTML Parser.

I finished!

I have graduated with my Ph.D. in Information Science and System Engineering from The University of Tokushima!!

Lately, I have been using the Mac Mini that I bought a couple years ago. After I first bought it, I did a little with it and disregarded it mostly due to not having the time to figure out the differences between OS X and Windows or Linux. However, as I return home later this month the Mac Mini will be me my only computer for a while. So, I have been using it a lot to try and get adjusted to things.

The first thing I did was to get the home & end keys to work in the way that I like, i.e. going to the beginning and end of the current line. Next, I loaded up mono and checked to see if the projects I am working on will compile and run. As I figured they run just like they do on Mono under Linux. I have been getting used to the differences and trying out a lot of different software. It has actually been an enjoyable experience. The only problem I have is that the Mini is the last generation that used the G4 processor and it only has 512MB of ram. These two things, at least in my experience, equate to slow processing at times. There are a few other things that bother me and I am trying to work out, but I think when I am in a position to purchase a new computer it will be another Mac.

I have started working with Java and creating the basic libraries I need for various web related applications. When writing a class for wrapping text based web resources one of the biggest problems is getting the correct encoding. Luckily, for Java there is a port of Mozilla’s automatic character set detection algorithms called jchardet. It is pretty simple to use and I have incorporated into the web resource class.