I’m Jack Carrozzo.
School
I’m currently at Worcester Polytechnic Intitute (WPI), majoring in ECE with some sort of minor or double in CS and ME… I can’t really tell which, but I seem to have a lot of credits in both so far. Previously, I went to George School.
Computing
I’ve been coding since 2001, and consider myself proficient in C, php, shell, perl, and scheme, and I can get around in C++, .NET, and Java. My hosts of choice are linux and Solaris, and prefer to do most anything though the console.
I learned about buffer overflows shortly after learning C, and began my network security phase. I succesfully wrote my own small TCP/IP stack in C raw sockets, and succeded in coding a few basic exploits for vulnberabilities that I found.
Distributed computing caught my attention during these years as well. At one point I had 17 old computers clustered in my basement, searching for primes and rendering video. After the circuit breaker started blowing every 10 minutes, I ditched those and got two SGI 1400’s from a friend.
My NBody code runs on the cluster, as does my prime finder code. I’ve also rendered videos and images with POVray and various other raytracers.
Robotics
I’ve always been intersted in the union of a great algorithm and a perfect mechanism. I wanted to build robots for years before I got enough materials to create my first. And though primitive, that little device stole my mind and was my life for quite a time.
Since then, I’ve built a robotic submarine, several small tabletop navigators for competions, a balancing robot, and many others. I generally use the BX-24 microprocessor, but tend to offload as much as possible to other chips, such as L297 stepper drivers and 7400 series logic.
I’m currently working on a robot with GPS to navigate my college campus well enough to avoid people and fetch me a donut in the student center (it’d have to pay, of course).
Engineering
Though I gernerally prefer to code than build due to lack of materials, when I can get things together I like to design machines to investigate things I’ve heard. The list of things I’ve built either by myself or with a friend include a submarine, a hovercraft, a trebuchet, an electric scooter, an RC airplane, an electric gokart, and several other things that I can no longer remember.
I’d like to be able to more accurately build what I design; currently I’m building a basic CNC machine so that I can design my parts in CAD.
Physics / Math
While both have always been dear to me, it’s not until recently that both have become an extension of my brain. I can’t drive without thinking about force vectors, I can’t do dishes without thinking about fluid dynamics, and I can’t play music without thinking about logarithms. While some would find this annoying, I embrace this, and get really intersted in the math or phyisics describing everyday life.
Various
In addition to the “nerd” things I do, I play hockey, play guitar in a band and various other instruments in my home studio, ski, bike, think, eat, and live life.