Archive for March, 2010

Early Spring Bloominghack!

Tuesday, March 23rd, 2010

– Alex is porting the rhyme-scoring code from the poetrybot to Python
– but right now, it only does end rhymes, which isn’t particularly interesting. (but it’d be pretty easy to expand to internal rhymes…)
– in research news, he plugged toulbar2 into the dependency parser (which uses constraint solving to do a parse — and now pretty soon will do “soft constraints”, or just “preferences”) — and is now thinking about how to find out what the weights on the constraints should be, with machine learning.

– Lindsey read about information flow security in a PL context (so, like: languages that support security levels in the type system. eg: jif)
– also: went running
– research news: working on translating a language with dependent types to continuation-passing style. Also, thinking about how to formally describe (like, with automated theorem-proving) the interactions between static and dynamic languages.

Focused Hack

Tuesday, March 2nd, 2010

It has snowed on three separate occasions in Atlanta this winter, and today was one of those days.

Rob is making a Game Boy (Advance) game, Asteroid Doom. He’s writing C code, using GBA mode 3.

Mark is learning Scala because he (amusingly) signed up to talk at the Atlanta Scala Meetup without knowing the language. He’s using it to make visual stuff in Processing.

We are both quite focused, as Rob’s game is for class and due by midnight, and Mark needs to learn Scala in the next 45 hours or risk losing face.

This weekend we attended the Guthman Musical Instrument Competition, listened to weird new instruments, watched talks by Gil, Jason, and Parag, chatted with Andrew Beck, Alex Rae, Nishant Mehta, and Karthik Raveendran. The highlights for me were the live-soldering performance and yjr suitcase full of solenoids. The magnetic resonator piano performance was also excellent, and we agreed, is the most likely to see wide-spread adoption.