Atlhack

Notes!

Lindsey:
– 8 work days left before summer vacation
– – down to 6 things on The Todo List That Refused To Die
– found an apartment in Bloomington!
– *still* chipping away at SICP

Martin:
– working on apparent (http://apparentaa.appspot.com/)
– that’s about it

Ashok:
– working on study guide flash-card app
– on own server
– lots of reading to understand algorithms: general techniques to optimize people’s retention

Alex:
– looked "A Fast Algorithm for Learning a Ranking Function from Large-Scale Data Sets"
– it’s got a lot of math
– started working on online course: http://www.stats202.com
– little bit of Scheme with Lindsey
– dithering around on the internets

Mark:
– hiking the AT

Humza:
– lots of rock climbing, hands are tired
– thinking about getting into Python

New Member: Dustin
– went to school at RISD
– rock-climbs with Humza
– joking about a movie where:
– – a man who burns other people’s copies of comics to make his copy more rare
– making Flash animations for Intel + Beijing Olympic ads
– partway through watching tekkonkinkreet

Drew:
– trying to get on the network
– getting into AMQP
– – similar to JMS (which he uses at work)
Lindsey:
– 13 work days left before summer vacation
– – down to 8 things on The Todo List That Refused To Die
– looking for an apartment in Bloomington!
– still chipping away at SICP
– – trying to finish chapter 1 exercises by the end of the month
Martin:
– working on Tyrus’s “flipping coasts” app
– – for keeping in touch with people after he moves
Erik:
– wrote code for adding negative captchas to rails apps
– not as excited by phusion passenger as tejus is
Rob:
– configuring his (thinkpad-mac) to do japanese (kotoeri) input
– ã?Œã‚“ã?°ã?£ã?¦ï¼?
Alex:
– reading Graham’s DAFX paper
– can’t do classloading (which jython needs) in an applet
– – wrote a blog post about it
– – to which Frank W. (big Jython guy at Sun)
– wrote some schema
– thinking metrics for how good a regression fit is
Ashok:
– says that Knuth doesn’t believe in unit-tests
Mike:
– researching how to get high-speed internet to his rural small-town
– – so that his younger brother can be part of internetdom
Mark:
– reading Graham’s DAFX paper
– chattering

New Member: Dan
– industrial engineering student at tech
– building an app for airline scheduling
– asking about jsp,php,java,ruby-on-rails

Zach
– working on a reading aid for ADD folks
– displays a file and highlights groups of words at a time
– – to prevent distraction
– – it’s written in swing
– – based on ideas from a speed-reading app
Tejus
– worked on server config for choices-quilts
– installed ruby on centos 4
Sonali
– working on the new rails version of choices-quilts
– having trouble with the “will_paginate” plugin
Lindsey
 – went to my college reunion in Iowa
– – saw family, saw friends, saw Alex, video blogged about it
 – learned about the law of “conservation of ream” from my Harvey Mudd
alum housemate
 – won NaRoRuMo 2008
 – finally making headway on SICP again; end of chapter 1 in sight
Rob
– being quiet
Martin
– working on apparent (the apartment finder)
– going to keep the birthdate of the craigslist posts
– – rather than repull listings from the database at each step
Mark
– researching datetime formatting and parsing
– – found a bunch of libraries in python/perl/javascript
– is going to write some code for parsing English text
– – representing repeated date events (like, every Tuesday from 8 to midnight)
Erik
– maintaining code, yay?
Alex
– working on the jython-in-an-applet-talking-to-javascript project
– – can call from js to applet, and back
– – but keeps getting security exceptions

Other people at Octane: Humza, Ashok, Ashok’s brother (Alok), Samir, Alice, Mike, Dan
Alok is taking the JES class with Monica Sweat
Discovered that Ashok (and Alok) are not Indian, but Nepali