Archive for September, 2005

Hackfest 100 Mortem

Thursday, September 15th, 2005

15 Sept 2005

Where is Everybody?
luke is contracting in reno
titus is dogsitting
ben garrison is sleeping
others said they’d be here, but they did not show

Since Last Time:
Vinny-
-poked around looking for scenegraphs
-panda3d would be good, but no Mac (sadly)
-options are ogre, and crystal space (more of a game engine)
Graham-
-nothing on Mused
-been working on SWIMM, trying to get MARSYAS to run on win32

This Time:
Vinny-
-play with Croquet (notes that it’s in Squeak- why it is so slow)
-wants to render words
Graham-
-get segmentation working
-refine to sample accuracy
-speed up a song by upping the onset rate
Mike-
-start school at UCSC

Realities:
Vinny-
-played around with Croquet -… it’s Squeak (slow and difficult)
-dragged around a full size card of Alan Kay (as a rabbit) and shot him with lasers
-Commotion is calculating save path – without full file pathname.
-no rendering just yet.
-submitted startup school app
Graham-
-fixed the frame by frame segmentation
-started working on zero crossing sample refinement
-didn’t finish

Hack Fest 100!

Wednesday, September 14th, 2005

Come feed your caffeine addiction and chat with us!  Last week we saw the Atlanta Python meetup, maybe we will run into another group whilest we chatter over projects.  Hopefully Titus will be present and not detained by the Seattle Mafia

Hilarity!

Hijynx!

Zealots of every operating system!

God Tower is a Very Difficult Puzzle Game

Tuesday, September 13th, 2005

God Tower is a very difficult puzzle game. Each level presents you with an image, and the point of the game is to guess the riddle that the picture presents. You input the answer to the riddle ( all lowercase one word), and then you proceed to the next level. I only had enough patience to get to level five (with a hint on level 3.)

I learned about God Tower from jay is games. Jay runs a fantastic blog about web games and game design. If you’re looking for something to burn some extra time, jay is games is a good place to start.

Songs of Hackfest, vol 1

Monday, September 12th, 2005

What are the best hacker inspired songs? I’ve always liked You’re So Technical from the Magnetic Fields.

Suggest your favorite hack-oriented songs.

You have prosthetic wings
You drive a surveillance van
You’re always doing seven things
You write the code for brain implants
There are no papers on you
The law doesn’t cover what you do
You and your think tank entourage
Are all counterculture demigods

(C): You’re so technical, you go hacking around the world
You’re so technical, baby, Are you a boy or a girl?

You have some extra limbs
You look like a Swiss army knife (with wings)
Dance like a Hindu deity
Best friends with Timothy Leary (C)

You’re a Libertarian
The death of the Left was you
You look like Herbert von Karajan
You live underneath the zoo (C)

From the House of Tomorrow. The consummate fan Ernest suggests this character was based on the chimerical electronic pop musician and storyteller Laurie Anderson (homepage of the brave), who is coming to Ferst Center Theater (scroll down) in November!!

Mactane

Monday, September 12th, 2005

Has anyone noticed that Octane has an overwhelming Mac to non-Mac ratio?  I think that its the highest I’ve seen in Atlanta.  If you’ve got a Mac, come hang out with the cool people!  

WOO HOO!

Monday, September 12th, 2005

We got an apartment.

One Man’s Graphics Pipeline

Sunday, September 11th, 2005

My attempt at constructing a basic graphics pipeline.  The pipleine should load vertices from an established format (ie obj files), transform polygons into screen space, perform lighting calculations and rasterize. 

Emphasis is on understanding the various stages of pipeline optimization rather than competing with DirectX or OpenGL.

It turns out that I have to do this as a TA in Alla Sheffer’s class. Bresenham is included (which is finished). Texture mapping is a BONUS.

The project was difficult because of some problems correcting seams in polygons but very straightforward.  Source can be furnished upon request.

Possible future avenues of the project are interfacing with the GPU to accelerate the pipeline, but this is unlikely to happen.

GPU programming libs?

Saturday, September 10th, 2005

Do any atlhackers have any experience with programming GPUs without using openGL or DirectX?  I’ve only heard of Brook for general GPU programming and I was wondering if there were any other public resources out there…

MIR book reviews

Saturday, September 10th, 2005

Computer Music Modeling and Retrieval 2003 – Wiil, Uffe K. (Ed.)

Weird potpourris of composition, music retrieval, system architecture, and musicological research papers are entertaining, if you like that sort of thing. As with other sequence analysis domains, the Similarity Matrix is key. My favorites:

Real Time Beat- Estimation Using Feature Abstraction – Jensen and Anderson

Beat and tempo extraction is a core MIR problem. They present a straightforward probability-based approach. Results are OK but on not much data, it is always hard to tell how things like this will actually perform. To evaluate it, one can only implement it and test it versus others. As the problem and field matures formal evaluation procedures (mirex 2005 results!) will decide how they do in comparison. Interesting because I plan on implementing a beat extractor soon.

The Study of Musical Styles in Central Africa: the Use of Interactive Experimental Methods – Marandola

Musicologist describes the use of interactive computer techniques to learn the basic scale and tone structure of two native music traditions—the Hocket Instrumental Polyphonies of Ouldeme flutes (Paris), and the Vocal Polyphonies of Bezdan Pygmies (Cameroon). In the latter case, polyphonic pieces were recorded on multiple tracks and re-synthesized by the computer based on models of harmony. The performers would reject the models until they were somewhat accurate.

Evolving Automatically High-Level Music Descriptors from Music Signals – the power team Zils and Pachet
(pdf of a similar work, access to CMMR paper closed)

High-Level music descriptors, like the presence of certain instruments, tempo, genre, are difficult things for which to design algorithms. In this work, signal networks are built up from low-level descriptors (FFTs, filters, correlations, etc) and grown using genetic algorithms. They attack the problems of Sine+Colored Noise, Presence of Voice, and Perceived Intensity. Since these are not the hardest problems around, this isn’t earth shattering, but it is pretty cool.

Other interesting papers on physical modeling synthesis, structural patterns in pop music and self-organizing maps.

Hack Fest 11 Links

Thursday, September 8th, 2005

Some links from today’s meetup:
    The Microkernel Paper
    Atlanta Python Meetup 

Other Atlanta computer type groups that I found on meetup.com:

    Atlanta Web Designers
    DotNetNuke