Who is baudburn?
Hi. My name is Aaron “baudburn” Kobayashi and I was born in the quiet city of Jamestown, New York. Its a sleepy little city nestled between Buffalo, NY and Erie, PA. I currently live in Dallas, Texas where I work as a software engineer for a concert/show lighting company. Next time you go to a major concert, take a look up at all the lights you see swirling around in sync. There’s quite a bit of technology used to make the show happen!.
What is your educational background?
I started by educational career at Vanderbilt University in the spring of 2000. I graduated from Vanderbilt Suma Cum Laude with a Bachelor of Engineering in Computer Engineering. After a short stint in industry, I returned to academia in pursuit of a Masters Electrical Engineering. I was a full time student and research assistant at Vanderbilt University in the Radiation Effects & Reliability Group. My group is the largest research group of its kind in any US university. I studied the effects of radiation on electronic devices and integrated circuits, focusing on the simulation of such events in realistically modeled transistors. This research is important because a fundamental understanding of the effects of radiation on electronics is widely applicable in, but not limited to, defense, space, and medical environments.
Where did the name “Baudburn” come from?
From time to time people ask me where I came up with the name “baudburn”. I will explain it as best I can. Way back in the days of 1200 bps modems, yours truly logged on to my first BBS known as the hard drive cafe. At that time he was a sixth grader at Persell Middle School. It asked me for a username and for lack of creativity, chose the name Hoffman (paying homage to Matt Hoffman, one of the most influential professional BMX riders ever). This name was not very satisfying and so the search for a more unique name began. While playing with various word combinations the word baud kept coming up. After talking with a friend, it was decided that burn sounded “cool” after the word baud; which was also four letters for symmetry, and provided a short but unique handle that I will cling to for the rest of my life. I have never run into any name collisions with this handle, and I hope I never will.
What is “Baud”?
The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing defines baud as a communications unit:
/bawd/ (plural ‘baud’): The unit in which the information carrying capacity or “signalling rate” of a communication channel is measured. One baud is one symbol (state-transition or level-transition) per second. This coincides with bits per second only for two-level modulation with no framing or stop bits. A symbol is a unique state of the communication channel, distinguishable by the receiver from all other possible states. For example, it may be one of two voltage levels on a wire for a direct digital connection or it might be the phase or frequency of a carrier.The term ‘baud’ was originally a unit of telegraph signaling speed, set at one Morse code dot per second. Or, more generally, the reciprocal of the duration of the shortest signaling element. It was proposed at the International Telegraph Conference of 1927, and named after J.M.E. Baudot (1845-1903), the French engineer who constructed the first successful teleprinter.
In the days of modems, baud was the number of symbols per second a modem could generated and bps (2400 bps for example, was the number of bits transmitted every second).
What hobbies do you have?
I have too many hobbies to think of in one sitting. I like to have a hand in many different cookie jars and have many projects going at one time.
I am of course interested in computers. This of course includes the standard CS type programming stuff, but I am more interested in the software hardware boundaries. In the CS world I naturally gravitate towards drivers because they are created out of code, but act in the real physical world. I am also interested in the application of computers to everyday life in the form of portable electronics and embedded systems.
My sport of choice is Capoeira, a Brazillian Martial Art that successfully blends fighting, dancing, and music. Furthermore I love cryptography puzzles, games of all sorts (card, board, video, etc), going out to clubs, and dancing to name a few.