Atlhack

Vinny: making combined SSH + browser app for iPad, based on PuTTY codebase, weird XCode/C language errors
David: showed us video of his code running an exhibition: zeitraum at the vienna airport
Jordan: checking out good game 4 mobile
Rob: researching cross-platform game engines (leaning towards MonoGame) for vomit tennis
Mark: writing a backend for the Spotify app in AppEngine/python/webapp2, considered fluidinfo or freebase, but dealing with user authentication seems premature

Chris: Finished editing bike trick video
Puyan: Worked on constant folding operations for a vector instruction set.
Farzon: Photobooth-style app using pixel shaders on Windows.
Vinny: OpenGenera stuff. First pull request!
Karthik: Music-brainz API, C++ template hacking to create priority queues that allow priorities of any node to be updated.
Mark: Made a Spotify app in HTML5, uses localStorage to associate a color with a song id.

(Thanks to Karthik for taking notes!)

Karthik:
– filtering songs by album release date and popularity, to create playlists (with a visualization)
– – got the echonest python api working
– – unfortunately it doesn’t have metadata about albums … maybe musicbrainz does?
– this week: learning F# (like OCaml for Microsoft’s CLR)
– his friend Sid used a program called “ez drummer” to synthesize

Joe:
– working on a game for “Fuck This Jam” in Flixel/Box2D
– it’s a 2D flight-simulator, with detailed controls and physically-based dynamics
– also showing off “ROY”
– – a puzzle game where you are a pulse of light, splitting and merging as it passes through filters
– mentioned the automated musician 386dx

Rob and Jordan:
– describing their idea for a 2D tennis game for the ouya console
– – backstory: there was going to be tennis tournament,
but a hurricane was coming,
so everybody went out and got wasted
but then the hurricance missed the tournament,
so they had to play anyways,
but everyone is really hung-over,
so if they move too much they vomit,
and then the court gets slippery
– – a bizarre cast of players including: “two different grover clevelands, like ken and ryu”
– we investigated making fake vomit for a promo video
– also: tv carnage, everything is terrible, animal charm, the holy mountain, el topo
– discussed the idea of a “supercut” – decontextualized film scenes group by content

David:
– found a workaround for an OpenGL/OS X bug (doesn’t handle luminance and alpha framebuffers, just use RGB instead)
– – for toon-shading of some branching tube structures
– this week: working on map-reduce and javascript

Mark:
– making (incomplete) sketches in processing
– – geometry interpreter: simple domain-specific-language for geometry problem solving
– – erosion: generate terrain by simulating erosion falling on a height-map
– – houses and routes: create rural villages by simulating path formation and house building

A founding member returns to Atlanta!

Vinny
– since last time: colorado, boston, now back in Atlanta doing independent consulting work (writing webservices in Closure)
– tonight: election stuff – lots of interactive infographics
– – you can zoom in and see the counties
– showing us Genera LISP running on a DEC alpha with X11 on a Mac
David
– working on his Flickr-maps project
– computing a weighted Voronoi diagram by rasterizing triangles
– – (debug-image-1, debug-image-2)
– going to use natural boundaries for the regions (water, highways, big parks and stuff)
– going to us “interestingness” for weighting regions
Chris McClanahan
– editing a BMX video with a gopro camera
– going to Supercomputing 2012 next week to represent AccelerEyes
– since his last Atlhack: graduated from program Master’s at GT
Karthik
– debugging shapes deformation/correspondence
– video game reverse engineering discussion with Mark
Mark
– discussing reverse engineering the physics of video games with Karthik

Also, coincidentally, sitting behind us was:
Chris Parnin, who was working on his dissertation (in software engineering with Spencer Rugaber).