SSL with client auth

Why oh why do we have to communicate securely? Can't we just trust that people won't be snooping on us?

Ok, so that's not realistic, especially with financial software customers... Still, dealing with tomcat and SSL with client auth can be a real pain. Especially when the communication is all happening in Java and the client is not a browser. I'd solved this the painful way via openssl, digitally signing and setting my internal certs to expire in 10 years hoping to never need to do it again... Well guess what? I wasn't careful enough and my CA cert was set to 1 year... Ack! So a year after I'd done all the work in OpenSSL, (and of course lost my notes on it,) customer software suddenly could not communicate properly! To make a long story short, the affected customers set back their clock to keep things running and I got them nice and patched in about a day.

And life goes on...

Instabilities

Well, unfortunately the code I brought across is not very stable except if left pretty much in the exact configuration it came in. So while the results are not bad (I even pulled a few tricks and had the FPS back up to about 900FPS or so -- up from 66FPS) in the end it's not all the useful.

On the other hand, it got me thinking and studying the problem and I now have more articles and resources than I can shake a stick at. More importantly, I now understand the physics and math involved in modelling cloth, so I've gone back to the drawing board and have put together a design for a much better version.

More as it comes!

Cloth and jME

-- jME Cloth --

The last few weeks have been all work and no play. My latest work project has been converting a client side financial summarization to a cached server side version. As interesting as financial coding can be -- erm, yeah -- I needed a nice break to keep myself from going postal on my monitor.

So, what better way to relieve stress and boredom caused by boring and tedious programming than to tackle a rather challenging coding issue? Yeah, I know what you're saying, but I feed off frustration.

The coding challenge I chose was to put together a cloth simulation in jME. There are many methods of simulating cloth out there, none implemented in jME though. Rather than reinvent the wheel, I focused on finding an existing solution in Java and porting it over. Unfortunately, I found nothing useful out there after a short search, so I opened the field up beyond Java and found several possibilities. One of these was a short Gamasutra tutorial based program written in Pascal -- a language I know almost nothing about having skipped right to C in school. Programming is programming though and the executable version of the code was very stable and gave good visual results.

Long story short, after many hours of weeding out porting mistakes due to my lack of Pascal knowledge (mostly involving the end conditions on for loops) I have it working! I hope to move on to allowing you to pass in any TriMesh and have it act like cloth. Also, allowing different configurations for the cloth... tension, elasticity, etc.

Well, back to work I guess!

Some good news

After many months of playing the waiting game, two large software contracts have finally made their way to the company through all the red tape and lawyers... With signatures and a first check even! Actually one still has to be realized (hopefully on Friday,) but it's looking pretty good. So what does this mean? No time for much else for the next month or so probably. But, all in all, a good thing.

Getting around

My recent admission to ASU led me to purchasing a motorcycle a week or so ago. I used to ride one to college a long time ago and since we are a one car family, I needed to find an affordable way to get around while leaving the car to my busy wife (she's getting started in real estate and notary signings...)

My family has a bit of a Honda tradition. My grandparents are good friends with a guy named Bud Morris who was evidently once president of Honda here in the valley or something like that. If you ask my father, any motorcycle worth riding on has to say Honda on the side of it. So, seeing as I didn't want to become a black sheep in the family I went for a nice 750cc 2005 Honda Shadow Aero. Here's a pic lifted from Honda's site in the correct colors:

I've added a windshield and leather saddlebags -- useful for carrying around those textbooks of course. I've only put about 50 miles on it so far, but the weather here recently turned a lot cooler so I'm looking forward to some nice rides ahead.

About me

Hi folks,

So, I've decided to put together my own weblog... Why? Well, mostly because it seems like a good way to blow off a little steam and make commentary on the things I'm hard at work on. Also, I'd like to get my writing habits back as I was once a prolific writer and can now hardly be bothered. I'd also like a way to log some thoughts I have on coding, life, games, etc. In short, who knows what will end up on these pages.

A bit about myself... I'm 26 and about 6'. I've been married to a wonderful gal named Jeni for about 5 years now and have a young son (3 in January!) named Aaron. I love solving problems, logic games, math and just using my brain in general. I also enjoy swimming which is a great pastime for people who live in Chandler, Arizona. I work in the custom software business, with my main project of the moment involving custom financial software for clients back on the east coast.

In my spare time I volunteer work on the Java - OpenGL scenegraph API, jME and also work - very slowly! - with my best friend, David Bitkowski (aka Graum) on a game currently called "Dirt".

I went to school at Columbia University in New York while working full time and was about halfway done when 9/11 struck. We decided to move then to Arizona to be closer to family and spend less money on living expenses. I'm expecting to go back and finish up my degree at ASU this coming spring.

I've worked as a programmer, webmaster, teamlead, manager, CTO, and most recently as a consultant in the software industry. My current language focus is Java, but I still dabble in Perl, PHP, ASP and C/C++ from time to time. I'm currently working as a consultant with a company called DragonLance Interactive, Inc.

That's about it. Feel free to check back in from time to time.