Writing and Dreaming and Reading...

I am so screwed.


My personal time limit for finding a project title has officially extended. I haven't chosen a title. Originally it was going to be based on NT's recommendation which was to build a Citrix receiver for WP7 (or part of it) - But this turns out to be kind of impossible. The code's not open sourced and it's being done by someone else.

Or

Make a kind of server crawler to search for tags to check on Hyper-V implementation in the system. - Which is possible but in my mind seems a bit limited.... And maybe a tad bit dull. It's kind of making a routine code and the only new thing is the fact that I'm learning it. This does not rock my socks for some reason. Curses, I am picky.

But I had a chat with the awesome NTO and he took me through the possible implementation of the topic and he was fantastic. I had a clearer view of the possible roadmaps for these projects and they were quite daunting. And he basically opened up a whole new list of possible fields and it basically left me with my jaw hanging and my head exploding with excitement! (Gosh, say what you want but I will NEVER get tired of being enthusiastic about these things. Haha, I will gush over servers.)

Bioinformatics:
I was partially inspired by an article about the greatest young scientists this year. A couple of them are creating visual programs to represent biological data. And I love info graphics; learning does NOT have to be boring. Apparently, there's more MS research being done in the medical faculty and they could use help on the technological side of it. This could be interesting not only because I'd have to learn a whole new field but there's not so much is done in way of visualizing the data (rather more of obtaining it) and using the data visualizations people can understand the problem faster, thus allowing them to solve it faster. This would make it majorly cool. Some idea's of possible projects was on high performance computing (which is a tough cookie on its own- it could not only be hardware but there's a major push for could on this one...) or on motion sensing (the sports department is interested). And if I choose to do this it would be easier for me to get in touch with MSR and I'd have resources in UM as well for the bio part. And maybe some at the computer science part. There are cloud developers in Malaysia anyway. 

Kinect:
It's such a nifty piece of hardware. And it's more than just gaming. Its main capabilities are movement tracking, 3D sensing capabilities and its 5 microphone system. There's so much one can do with it apparently the examples from the Kinect Camp can tell you that. The 3D sensing capability is already a major wow by itself. By sensing the depth and also using the camera view one can recreate the 3D vision of the room. Or even a bust or a whole person actually. It's the cheap and easy way to do this and that in itself is majorly cool. Another main feature that was fascinating was the fact that the 5 microphones are really sophisticated. For example, they could detect two people speaking and by using a program, separate those two sound streams. And in the end you'd get to hear each person talking individually. How cool is that?! So to further develop this I could possibly of write code to refine the digital signal processing of the sound data. This is totally intimidating. DSP is hard.
This is a major piece of tech right now and it's newly picked up. There's a lot of buzz and a lot of people looking into it. If I pick this up I'd be the first few in Malaysia. And that's just... wow...  I can do this on two different levels, on the application side or the hardware side which would be great for me to get an emphasis on hardware. I'm just not sure what to do with this yet.

WP7:
I told myself to not write off completely the phone! Not only is there a push for development from the DPE, I am also planning to code for it anyway with the MSP's. So why not just have it all done in one go? I haven't actually got a specific project about this one. But there's still a lot I can do. I just had this look on this video about motion sensing. It's just the tip of the iceberg of what it can do. And there are many other OS related stuff I could probably do - I just have to nose it out. But it's more of app building rather than anything else, I think.  

Bonus idea:
An operating system based on interoperability of devices and scaling across architectures; creating an OS that would work on any device. The systems created now are pretty much tied to the specs of the hardware. And for every hardware created, it has to be adjusted and it doesn't always work so well. TO be able to create something that integrates the devices seamlessly would be a breakthrough! Imagine having the same operating system for your phone, laptop, TV or whatever and getting the same kind of performance, the same kind of power and yet would be able to work together seamlessly. The easiest example of seamlessness would be transferring files or running applications. That would be cool. And in some ways Windows 8 would probably try to be that. I don't think it has gone that far yet. But another approach would probably still be cloud computing where everything else could be a dumb terminal - minimal requirements any way you want it. 

I'm actually mostly worried about the inter-disciplinary issues. If I want to do these projects why not just be in Telecommunication Engineering, Computer Science or Biomedical Engineering? Is it not "pure" enough for Computer Engineering? It overlaps and integrates so I'm not sure why I'm specialized in this subject anymore. It can all be positioned to portray the right angles so I'm not to worry about that. My goal is to understand the OS and get to OS development. But I know I got so far to go and I can't even pick on something to get started on. The three main criteria's to look out for is to address a real world problem (if I'm solving something for someone they would support it and plus it's going to be USEFUL), community and supervision (from the faculty if possible).

And honestly, I can't BELIEVE I'm driving all this change by myself. MS has been so supportive and I've felt like I've done so much. Not that I think there are some disappointments: I don't think I learnt as much as I should have. I wish I had the time to fully understand how the organization works. I think I understand a lot more about EPG than any other department. But maybe it's for the best for now, the organization is changing and there's still time before it settles and I have to relearn the whole thing. It's probably something that the MBA's would probably understand better, as a strategy level with its underlying theories and philosophies. Like what I've been reading from Daddy's books. Another thing which I'm sure about (with myself) is the fact that I didn't learn as much as I wanted to about the technology. I actually have only scratched the surface of servers, virtualization, SharePoint, could computing and some consumer technology but it's not as deep as I want it to be. I feel like I should have spent more time on it instead of chewing my hair (figuratively) about the marketing strategies. Well, now let’s focus on that. Because it's cool. Heh. 

Course of action:
Talk to DPE about other projects.
Talk to the faculty about possible guidance and direction.
Read. =__=
Get to Mango programming.