User:Hans1732

Bio Type Stuff
Name: James Hansen

Location: The Metro Area of Minnesota in the Unites States

Ocupation: Primarily I'm a student at the University of Minnesota but I am also a Research Assistant at the LCSE which is a research laboratory at the University. In short, our lab is interested in high performace computing. I've mainly been working on refining the implementation of our own global-database-driven filesystem. Student-wise, if you haven't already guessed, I'm a computer science student. As a student, I'm more interested in the data side of computer science than the systems side. Mainly, I'm fascinated with data structures, databases, and artificial intelligence.

Interests: Like I said before, I'm really interested in data structures, databases, and artificial intelligence as a computer scientist. Outside of that, I like to read books on a lot of varying topics, from fiction to fact.

Programming Projects: Starting with my first real program GasLaws in late 2001 (I'm not going to count the little TI-BASIC programs I wrote before that), I've kind of drifted around as my skills improved and imagination wandered. I've primarily written a lot of utilities for myself (text-parsers, text translators (mostly in changing from one format to another, but I did write a rudimentary language translator that died with a computer crash), news-feed readers and the like). Recently, I've been working on two projects that I think are extremely useful. One, Projekt Physik, was inspired as I was taking physics as well as a computer science course on data structures. Mainly my intention with it is to create a framework from which applications can be based, and then use that framework to write a program to do my homework (I get really tired really fast with repetitive busy work), and anyone else that would be willing to shell out five bucks for the software (A few people bought the extremely early version of the software and enjoyed it). The second project is one I'm developing based on inspiration from my job and from the headache of trying to manage the data on five seperate computers (the things you can get a surplus store). I say inspired by my job since it is a completely different approach to the problem as well as a completely different design for the global file system. I'm implementing the design in C# since I've found it relatively simple to do so, and the connections for database access (I'm using MySQL for my database server) are easy (I found it a major headache to get Java to connect to any database, and the MySQL C++ connector isn't so hot) to use and readily available. I've got it mostly working, but I'm still testing and expanding the functionality of the system, and I never release anything to the outside world unless I'm happy with it. Right now, I'm calling it Heron for Hero of Alexandria since he could be called the first programmer and was big into automation, which is the purpose of this project.

Computer Languages: I'm comfortable with a range of languages:
 * C
 * C++
 * C#
 * Java
 * MIT Scheme
 * PHP

This is about all I can think of for now. Other than that listend above, I tend to trawl through the tech-related stuff here making occasional corrections but mainly just reading through and learning things I didn't know before.