My Maxwell Minute A Blog by Max Peterson

A much needed update

It's been about half a year since I last made a blog post, so I figured it's time for an update on things.

I began my college career this past fall at Iowa State University studying Computer Engineering. First semester was great! I absolutely love college. I am living in the Friley Hall dormitory with my high school friends and it's a lot of fun. I've met some cool people too. In terms of Comp E classes, I learned so C last semester with Dr. Daniels. We used it to manipulate data input from wiimotes. C is really annoying compared to other languages I have worked with, so I'm glad I won't be doing a whole lot with it in the future (I think/hope). This semester I am taking a Java class. So far it is identical to C#, which I already know. Hopefully it will expand my java and C# knowledge towards the end of the semester.

One of the more exciting technology related things that has happened to me so far in college is the 2010 ISU Cyber Defense Competition. I created a team with Zach, and 4 freshmen we had never met before. Zach and I were the only ones with past CDC experience, and amazingly we won first place! This was really quite amazing, as we were competing against much older teams who have been through more college than us. I guess operating our own home servers has really helped a lot. Because we won, our team was invited to compete in the 2011 National Cyber Defense Competition on February 19th. We are currently preparing for that competition. This year they have moved completely to visualization. Instead of each team having multiple old-ish boxes to host OSs on, each team has one new(er) server with VMWare ESXi installed. This is quite excited, as Zach and I run ESXi on our home servers. We are looking forward to the competition!

Besides college classes and cyber defense things, I have been continuing to work for the Ames Community School District's Technology Department. In addition to that, I have been growing Zach and I's DJ hobby/business, P&H DJ and Sound Services. We were asked to be the DJ for Ames High's Homecoming week, which went very well. Since then we have gotten Ames' Winter Formal, Prom, and 8th Grade Formal, as well as Boone's Winter Dance. I really enjoy doing high school dances and am looking forward to DJing more in the future.

Something I have never mentioned on this blog is Zach and I's DMX Software we are writing. We want to have full featured lighting control without spending hundreds or thousands on a good lighting console. So we have begun writing a program that sends DMX signal via a USB-DMX dongle. We have gotten it up to the point of being able to use it in gigs, but we still have a ways to go in order to get all the functionality we are looking for. It has been a great experience in terms of learning object oriented programming for me. Speaking of software, my friend David Naylor who writes the iTunes Jukebox software that we use for song requests is about ready to release version 3.0, as well as a completely revamped website complete with a Paypal cart and product key generator! I will be making a blog post when it is ready. It is truly great software and I hope it is successful in the market.

Last thing for this update. I am excited to say that I am now an Andorid user! I was able to take advantage of U.S. Cellular's Thanksgiving sale and get myself an HTC Desire. I absolutely love this phone. Experimenting with custom ROMs has been a lot of fun! Currently I am using UltimateDroid 3.0 RC which runs on Android 2.3.2 (Gingerbread). I love the customizablity that open-source Android offers and I can't wait for the future updates and market apps that will be coming out. In my opinion the iPhone dies not even compare because of the endless possibilities Android offers.

I think that's all for now. Hopefully you can look forward to posts here more often. Heck maybe I'll even finish the post about my new computer that I've been promising for 6 months. Feel free to comment as always!

Take care,
Max