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Some information about me...
My name
is Dan Micsa and I was born in the first day of 1967
in Timisoara,
Romania, 50 km from
Serbian and Hungarian border. Timisoara is one of the most modern cities
in Romania, with a strong academic history.
In 1977 I start to play Bridge and Chess pretty regular making
a passion for mind games.
In 1980 I learned the 4000 year old game of Go that remained
one of my main hobbies together with programming. This complex mind games
continue to still more than 10 hours each week. More about my mini achievements
in Go at the end of this page.
After a
pretty successful poker series on the Christmas night of 1981
I had the opportunity to buy my first personal computer I was 14 years old and
the computer was a Sinclair ZX81, was just fresh released with 1K of RAM and I
had enough money for an extra 16k extension as well. It was my dream machine
until the beginning of 1983 when I exchange it for a
Sinclair ZX Spectrum with 64k, 8 colors, 3.5MHz and a tape recorder. This
computer had changed my life, spending with it plenty of my time programming
various kind of applications and games.
In 1985, I finished C.D. Loga High School with specialty
Mathematics-Physics being one of the most misbehaved students they ever had.
Yep I was always a problem child :-)
I passed
my exams and I arrived fresh student at our Polytechnic Institute in
manufacturing specialty. Yep In that period of time (communist era) to arrive
student wasn’t an easy task I must pass 3 exams, physics, algebra and geometry
being more than 7 potential students for one place.
In 1986 I meet my life-time love (she is here so I can’t write
what I want) called Adriana
the one that become later my wife.
After 9
months of army in 1985-86 period, I started University
and ‘till 1991, for 5 years, I was a student. I won
many mini-awards in University arriving quite to represent our Polytechnic
Institute to the national Programming Olympiad in 1987
being a mechanical engineer not a programmer :-). I’ve continue to play Bridge,
Go and Poker with some success this period and programming a lot scientific
applications in particular in area of fixtures, tool design, data analysis and
processing, manufacturing, mechanisms doing practically all my projects as
programs on my Sinclair Spectrum I was fascinated by computers. My master (was
called diplomat engineer in my country) thesis was called “Real Time
Functions Processing and Visualization”. Uh I just forget, in winter of 1990 I just brought my first real computer a PC 286 + 287 +
VGA + 1M RAM + color display + 16MHz + 10M HDD = a jewel! So I had enough horse
power to finish my master thesis. I start using Turbo Pascal as programming
language. I did mental wrestling for 6 months to solve the real-time part of
the problem learning plenty of tricks in caching data in Pascal and assembler.
Turbo Pascal was a beast and was for first time to use a compiler on a
machine that was way faster than my old Spectrum. So I finish the University in
summer of 1991 with 9.30 or 93% and white hair only
good to retire :-)
In a
summer day of 1991 when I active and meaningful spent
my time playing football (soccer), swimming, drinking endless beers and having
parties with my brother Horia
and other enthusiastic guys, without having any idea about what I’ll do next in
my life, my mom came in my room and show me and advertising in a local paper
about an auction to write some specialized program in CAM (computer aided
manufacturing) field for one of the biggest mold and die maker in my city. The
name of the company is ROMACOST
SA. I decide to go and see about what they are talking about. So I was
there and 4 companies specialized in software development were present and I.
ROMACOST’s managing director explained to the guys in auditorium what are the
requirements of the project: a mini CAD/CAM system for mold and die design for
2, 2.5 and 3 axes milling. One of the guys from a company presented there had
programmed an APT (language used to describe tool paths for NC machines, kind
of basic) processor that worked pretty decent in 2D so he made some lobby to
split the problem in 2D and 3D because a CAD/CAM product in 2D and 3D is way
too much in one go. The managing director agrees and people start bidding they
start with 2D product and the minimum was $1500 from the guys with the APT
processor. I was quiet (that’s unusual in my case) because I didn’t understand
what the heck they are talking about plus were present reps of 5 company plus a
24 years youth without any experience in the area (or I in this case). When
they start bidding for the 3D system nobody had bid for it (because they know
the complexity of the project I didn’t :-) ). So I asked if they want to pay
$3000 when they cut first part in metal if I’ll write a program for them but I
can’t guaranty anything because doing tool offset gauge-free in 3D wasn’t quite
a thing that was in my day to day repertoire. They verbally agree and I left them
agreeing to contact them in 2 months time with an update to our project. I
start to work to this project using a pincushion representation of the surface
or a uniform grid kind or a monochrome image where different shades of grays
are Z heights I had a lot of good code from my master thesis plus the GUI and
3D viewer was in place. I (re)invent gouge free degauging using sequential
dropping. This was easy to code and was 100% robust. This was an achievement so
I did some rudimentary surface modeling like analytic surfaces, surfaces thru
sections, and many other simple thingies because I was pretty experimented in
modeling so my mini CAD (computer aided design) was shiny very quick so I
convert everything in my Z map using simple min, max, add and subtract functions
(or solid operations how I called them) and everything was ready for a first
go. I write like a mad guy about this tiny story but I consider this The Thing
that influenced my life most. I presented, in 2 two months, as agreed, my
mini creation that I call it TechnoPack composed of TehnoCAD (the modeler) and
TehnoCAM (the offset algo plus a basic lace cycle nothing fancy) to the guys at
ROMACOST. They like it and we manage to cut a Citroen part in the afternoon of
the first day. Lucky for me, the guys with 2D CAD/CAM did the DNC (Direct
Numeric Control) so was a walk in the park to copy the tool path via serial
port. They told me – “to cut it before was necessary at least one
month work” - so shorting the time to one day was something for them they agree
to pay me but wasn’t possible because I don’t work for a company. I solved fast
this problem opening a small company called BillaSoft
(I GoogleIt because the site and company are not longer on the market) and I
could take the money official. And this is the start of everything in my
professional life.
I was
proud because I was able to cut any monotonic in Z part, gauge free, in
particularly because I spiritually “kick” my father badly. He was our professor
in manufacturing discipline, and a long lasting “enemy” in scientific argues
about impossibility of using automations and computers in doing that, typically
“old boy” mentality :-)
In summer
of 1992 after my mini-success in generic milling our
manufacturing department becomes interested about the technology used and
invite me to take a PhD in this “pioneering” area of research I accepted to
work to a PhD thesis only part time because I already been a busy “business
man” managing my company and having a lot of potential clients asking me about
CAM software. So this is the start of my PhD thesis called: “Generic Methods
for Generation, Conversion, Import, Export, Analysis and Optimized Tool Path
Generation using Discrete Surfaces" that you can view it or downloaded here. Warning is in Romanian language that
looks and sounds a bit like Italian if you find it scary at least has more than
200 cool pix for that period in time. My supervising professor was prof. dr. George
Draghici and he spend a lot of time to help me finding my way in
presenting in an fluent manner all the material that was in my mind suitable
for a PhD thesis. I thanks him for this.
In April 1993 Adriana’s parents and mine decided is time for us to
make our dirty and peaceful relation more official in particularly because she
was pregnant and they considered this unbearable we’ve been OK with this and we
did it.
In autumn
of 1993 our girl Patricia came on this world
and she managed to piss us off since then :).
From 1991 to 1996 I worked for my
company doing everything that is necessary to stay in business writing software
so I acquire a lot useful and useless experience in: drinking (ooohhh pardon
me, dealing) with clients, talking with directors, grabbing requirements,
mapping their bloody needs in software components, implementing, testing,
delivering, training, service and so on. I’ve developed plenty of new products
to my TehnoPack series that now was composed from more than 8 products
depending on client need. One of the most important was GNCPP (generic numeric
control post processor) packed in TechnoPack Lite that can still be downloaded
from various
sites. I wonder for how long it is still for DOS and written in Turbo Pascal so
potential useless.
At the
end of 1996 I decide C++ is the language of choice and
I start to program in it I used VC++ and I start fast to love it. I was
fascinate by possibility of doing template programming and to use generic
containers and algorithms optimized at compile time - this was something for me
that I need a lot of speed in my market.
In summer
of 1996 I create a site with some of my results in
CAD/CAM arena and in September of 1996 I was contacted
by Mr. David Boucher managing director of Pathtrace
ltd. He came and visit me in Timisoara and we had great time speaking about
professional CAD/CAM systems, after our meeting he asked me if I don’t want to
join Pathtrace and I didn’t require too much time to say yes because I was
overhelmed with work arriving to program only part time and working 70 hours /
week with no weekends and no holydays. I moved to Reading, Berks, UK near
London in spring of 1997 and I was employed as an
senior analyst programmer and later as principle analyst programmer. Here I had
opportunity to program C++ + STL(Port) 90% of the time 45 h /week making four
times more money and this was great! I had plenty of time to finalize my PhD
and to public defend it in autumn of 1998 and I just
make my name a bit longer since then. At Pathtrace I did mainly optimized
tool path generation based on discrete technologies and I was a member of the
lovely math team so plenty of data acquisition, processing and presentation,
large scale software architectures using Rational ClearQuest and ClearCase
products + UML + Visio. I was in London at a Guerilla C# training in late 2000 and I fall deeply in love with Microsoft dotNET, by far
the cutest programming technology around. Pathtrace is ISO9000 certified
company so I learn a little bit of “discipline” too :-)
In 1999 I won “British Small Go Board
Champion” title that was my most precious achievement in Go. I won
smaller titles too but I don’t bother you with them here.
In 2001 bored by British traffic around London I decide to move
on and opportunity came from VX Corp of
Palm Bay, Florida. Here I’m employed as Lead Software Engineer. This is another
kind of company around twice as big, with a professional team doing one of the
most successful CAD products. My job assignments are to design and implement a
viable mold and die machining package and I did it. It is called VX QuickMilling and I pretend
it is one of the most complete and fast CAM for mold and die (3 axes) in the
market, it is still very young and is under heavy development but shines in
many aspects. I did other small projects too: like point cloud stitching using
progressive annealing, or real time point cloud decimation, optimisations in STL
importing, healing, large assembly drawing. I wrote an entirely new Post
Processor customizable via XML and self programmed via C++ reflection (not
dotNET), I help preparing the technical material in QuickMill presentation,
taking pictures, image processing and other minor DTP tasks.
In July 2003 I won first “Florida State Go
Champion” title that is my major achievement in Go.
In August
2003 I won “Kyu Killer” and
“Hurricane” title in self paired tournament and 3rd place in 3 Dan players group with 5 out of 6 points at
at the most prestigious US tournament “US GO Congress” held in Houston, Tx.
More info you can find here. I
took my 4th Dan rank as well.
Some cuts
from American Go
eJournal are here.
In the
middle of 2006 my wife’s second
abortion failure resulted in the born of our second girl called: Isabella
Melissa.
These
days I play a lot Civilization IV and GO. My nickname is: billator
on KGS for Go or Civ IV HOF. Some of my achievements in Civ IV can be found on:
Civilization IV Hall Of Fame.
A word of
warning Civ IV is a adictive game, one of the best I ever played, so play it
with caution!
You can download my professional Resume as a DOC or PDF file.
Some of my work...
My PhD thesis can be found here.
You can
see some of my written papers here the old related more my struggle to learn
generic C++ and computational geometry:
¨
1998
A use case study for Uniform Grids.doc
¨
1998
Along Axis Uniform Grids.doc
¨
1998
How to apply an Algorithm to an Object using polymorphism.doc
¨
1998 PIN.doc 1999
Generic Multiple axis support using operator overloading.doc
¨
2001
Expanding Numeric behaviour for ForwardSequence[Numeric]type.doc
¨
2001
Generic dumping for Containers[AnyType] and pair[AnyType1, AnyType2].doc
Market
Forecasting and Simulations:
¨
2010
Some Results in Market Simulation and Forecasting.docx
¨
2010
P123 All Stars 9 Years Backtest.docx
¨
2010
Unified Broad Equity ETF Timing
Disclaimer: Sorry
for the random and poor scientific format and content but I didn't intend to
publish them so read them at your own risk :-)
Some interesting links...
If you
like C++ try to surf on: http://www.boost.org,
http://www.stlport.com my
contributions to C++ community are to small to be enumerated here.
If you
like computer graphics like me: VTK, Open Scene Graph, povray, Hugues Hoppe web site
are some mouth watering links.
If you
consider is that time in your life when you should start to play go some good
links can be: American Go
Association, British Go Association
In any
regards you can contact me at: dan@dmicsa.com
or dmicsa@hotmail.com.
Thanks
for your time in reading this yet another boring corner of cyberspace.
