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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 then 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 in 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 4^th 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 view or download my professional CV.

Some of my work...

My PhD thesis can be found here.

You can see some of my written papers here:

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.