The End of One Year and the BeginniNG of Another

The last year has been rather busy. Changing jobs, coming up to speed at Dräger, unity programming, motion capture and a variety of other pursuits.

Work

The last few months have been largely consumed by the tail end of my time at KMC Systems and coming up to speed at Dräger. I’m now stepping into a cyber-security role on our existing monitoring product. This is an area that I’ve had an interest in for some time but until recently the medical device world has largely tried to meet their security needs with an external firewall with little internal security on the protected network.

The customer base and FDA appear to be rapidly becoming far more aware of computer security issues. I tend to put the down to the rash of recent activity where medical data is encrypted by criminals and a payment demanded for release of the keys. This hits organizations in the pocket book and impacts patient care at the same time (much more visible to these organizations than leaks of personally identifying information). We have rapidly moved from a universe where computer security was viewed as a nuisance to one where it is seen as a requirement.

Much reading and research over the last few weeks to back-fill any gaps in my knowledge I’m aware of and locate tangible back-up for things I know but wasn’t able to back up with authoritative sources. I feel like I’m just about over the steep part of the learning curve now…so next bit of busy will be writing up what I’ve pulled together.

I miss the people I worked with at KMC but I’m much happier with the challenges I’m being presented with here than I was helping out with the tail end of Newton development. Now that I’m finding a bit of breathing room, I need to drop email to some of my friends back at KMC. I know I’m not good at staying in touch, but I intend to work on being better…

VR

Work on VR coding has been pretty well shelved since the beginning of last summer. This is mostly down to the job change and various bits of being busy leading up to that.

I think I’m finally at a point where I can get back to work on that front. I expect to spend some time learning blender 2.8 first. This should help me make more interesting items to incorporate in my unity games.

Once I’ve gotten to where I’m happy with an initial level of blender competency, I’ll switch back to working on the cluster game (see more details on pandamallet and cluster-1 in my github account. I finally uploaded the latest version of the game game code over the holiday…I hadn’t realized that I had done that much work without pushing code but I expect to keep things more in sync now.

I expect to get back to working with 3D tracking of optical beacons with multiple cameras sometime in the future, but probably not until I’ve got much more done with Cluster.

I am clearing the decks in the basement to free up a larger working area for the room-scale VR. Hoping to have most of the back half of the finished part of the basement cleared and the working boundaries expanded appropriately.

Lots more to play with on the VR front, but I’m going to try to limit my distractions in order to get Cluster to a playable point before shooting off in another direction.

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