I am a software developer/engineer currently living in Virgina Beach. I work for BMH Associates writing various kinds of software for modeling and simulation. I develop primarily on Linux using C/C++ as well as Java.
I originally hail from Big Stone Gap, Virginia. It's a small town located in the Southwestern part of Virginia. I graduated from UVA's College at Wise in May 1998 (when it was called Clinch ValleyCollege) with a B.S. in Computer Information Systems.
In December of 2002, I completed a M.S. of Applied Physics and Computer Science at Christopher Newport University. The emphasis is Computer Science. I completed the thesis option.
My thesis involved simulating particles as they traveled through the Hall D detector using HDGeant. These particles would interact with the detector components causing data to be generated. The hardware trigger would be responsible for collecting data and cutting data triggered by particles that are not of interest. It is necessary to cut this data, because of the high data rates. The data rate is not as high as CERN's but it is not small. I believe that once everything is built and running full blast that the total data collected per year will be in the range of 10's of petabytes (100,000 gigabytes).
My focus was on cutting the bad events from the data stream. I used Java, (JAS) and GALib. JAS was used to plot data, pre and post process, and simple analysis. GAlib was used to find solutions to an equation that would cut most of the bad events while keeping almost all of the good. Very, very few good events should be deleted. I was reasonably successful.