More hacking in Bloomington

February 3rd, 2010 by alexr

- Alex has restarted his efforts to programmatically generate bad poetry.
– fixed the bit-rot in his old Lisp/inference-engine version
– started porting code for rhymes into Python
– NLTK is going to make this a whole lot easier.
– (((UP EVERYBODY) (ACROSS ALL DELIRIUM) (COME SAVE MAN WHILE OUT)))
– This wants to be running on App Engine, so people can vote snippets of text as POETIC OR NOT.

- Lindsey went to rehearsal for the choral piece she’s going to perform, answered a bunch of questions from her students, and is reading some papers about Foundational Proof-Carrying Code. And is still waiting to hear back from Jane Street.

Some of the grad students around Bloomington have started a weekly “study party” on Sunday afternoons at the local coffee shop — we need to hijack this and get them to work on cool side projects.

Also, our friend Will Byrd is getting a local hardware-hacking group together… he’s got Arduinos (etc) and is building animatronic kitties.

Orange Waffles

November 17th, 2009 by Mark Luffel

It has been a few weeks since we’ve posted.

We had a little server down-time when upgrading to Karmic Koala. But we’re back. Last week Mark and Tejus talked about genetic algorithms, because Tejus’s new company does some of that and Mark has been pondering a project that involves them.

And this week:

Rob
– Learning how to write an Atari program
– Going to make a variant of pong based on jai-alai with a swinging motion of the joystick
– Wrote a program in the Chef language for making orange-flavored waffles, which prints out the monetary fine for pirating a song, hopefully he’ll post this somewhere, it’s awesome!

Mark
– Intended to write some geometric code, can’t concentrate
– Read about Atlanta Startup Weekend 3 instead

Hackfest

October 14th, 2009 by Mark Luffel

Richard is working on two songs for the Mediashare Benefit tomorrow at Smith’s Olde Bar

Emily is working on a sermon, by way of Facebook ;)

Rob shows us his Processing project that includes video of Glenn Beck + Katie Couric, plus flickr images of “obama + racist”. Is going to Under the Couch to watch Stuart perform

Eldon is turning his phone into a SIP gateway via Bluetooth, having issues with RFCOMM socket

Alsie is reading “The Green Collar Economy” and looking at “Wild Things” forts on booooooom.com

Mark is wrangling Java security for his Processing server (named “Projecting”)

First Day of Autumn 2009

September 30th, 2009 by Mark Luffel

Rob:
Intended to work on Processing, instead wrote Japanese, including mysterious essay ending, talked with Mark about the technology of cinema. Wearing a threadless hoodie.
Mark:
Browsed papers from “Artifical Life” journal, hacked on his Processing server project, talked with Dustin about traditional animation tweening notation. Wearing a holey sweater.

Hacking in Bloomington

September 29th, 2009 by alexr

Lindsey is writing some OCaml, evaluating lambda calculus expressions. “Also known as programs!”, she adds.

Alex is learning numpy and using it to model some Markov processes. It’s for an NLP class, but the use of numpy is totally gratuitous. He keeps meaning to autogenerate some bad poetry.

Happy hacking, ATL and Bay Area hackers!

Atlhangout 09

September 15th, 2009 by Mark Luffel

Lots of old friends, a little bit of hacking.

Jason Ho is back in town from Taipei, will be moving to Silicon Valley in a few months.
Puyan Lotfi is back from Microsoft/Seattle, doing a Master’s Degree in CS at GT.
The Reverend Emily Case is hanging out and writing a sermon.
Sonali had eye surgery and Tejus will soon. Their company is having trouble.

Puyan also brought along fellow Master’s students, who are hacking on a Knowledge-Base AI detective problem.
And the usual suspects, Mark and Rob are hanging out and maybe writing some interactive fiction.

Bloominghack: 09/08/2009

September 8th, 2009 by Lindsey Kuper

Tonight: a bunch of kids from the CS department out at Soma Coffee
near Downtown Bloomington.

Alex:
- polishing up his latex skills
- doing some R
- reading Statistics book
- (ok, this is all for class; should be doing a side project…)

Lindsey:
- reading about intelligent agents in Russell and Norvig
- answering student questions for B521 (http://www.cs.indiana.edu/classes/b521)

Andy (another IU CS Ph.D student):
- Working on a related works section for a paper on a Ruby-based
compiler toolkit (RubyWrite) and reading about those related systems.

Also present: Ben, Mark, Christine, Rebecca, and Wren.

Hackfest 10100001

September 1st, 2009 by Mark Luffel

Rob
– hacking interactive fiction with Inform
– going to make a game where you fall asleep to go back in time

Mark
– writing some Processing code for school
– went to the Freeside meeting and got my keycard

Hackfest 10100000

July 22nd, 2009 by Mark Luffel

Alex’s going-away-hack.

Rob
– doing CSS with Kelly
– going to karaoke
Kelly
– searching for jobs
– updating her online resume
– using Firebug!
Erik
– didn’t install Ruby 1.9.1
– playing WoW
Sonali
– fixing production issues for work
– survived layoffs
Tejus
– working on CSS refactoring
– survived layoffs
Emily
– learning HAML
– finding her way around a Sinatra session
Molly
– reading her RSS on Emily’s computer
– finished knitting her tank top
Alex
– working on passive-voice-detector with NLTK
– has it mostly working
Mark
– trying out new Mac software
– working on a processing sketch for Corkbird

Hackfest 10011111

July 15th, 2009 by Mark Luffel

We discussed exercise, CouchDB & MongoDB & Lucene, that bridge at Marietta St and Jones Ave, shooting lasers from your hips, Encyclopedia Brown fan-fic.

Alex Rae:
– doing some software engineering management planning things
Bill:
– wrote some lyrics
– wrote a thing which is almost an essay and posted on the internet
Erik:
– fixed his RSpec’s
– prepared for a conference call on Monday that didn’t happen
John:
– started a new project “meal-o-rific”
– meal-planning-grocery-shopping-recipe-tracking app
– almost got it talking with google calendar
Alex Rudnick:
– reviewing more CIKM papers
Lindsey:
– learning about monads from a category theory perspective
– is the co-author on a paper, so now she has to help edit it
Rob:
– playing with OSC, frustration
– drew a diagram on how to play a film on several screens at once
Mark:
– reading about pattern formation
– switching to Firefox from Safari so that he can use Zotero