Atlhack

Jordan: making gifs of running tennis dudes, one in a sweater
Rob + Jordan: pair programming of the physics
– have a bouncing ball, paddle, moving character guy, gravity

Erik: writing a replacement for Ruby’s ipaddr library
– for ip address comparison
– stores as bigint, c library for parsing
– subnets and equality testing
– ragel

David: leap motion
– point at pixels
– crazy weekend, claremont lounge
– job hunting

Mark: clustering hand-drawn curves
– using k-means
– based on size/aspect-ratio of oriented bounding box and curvature of curve

Karthik
– Running a test of blending simulations together
– First marching squares output from simulation interpolation
Chris
– Lightroom + GIMP script for “infrared” (swap red and blue channels)
Mark
– Creating file format for sketching out game prototypes

Topics of Discussion:
– thrust/arrayfire
– cycloramic app
– as it turns out, none of us are submitting to SIGGRAPH this year

These are notes from December 11th. This week (December 18th) most of us didn’t go to Octane, but Jordan and Rob did go, and drew comics. (Maybe they

Joe:
– was “hacking from home”
– added features to save your game and enter your name in roy-wip
Rob:
– got the ps controller talkin’ to processin’
– made aliases for all the buttons
Jordan:
– installed Mono then dicked around on the internet
– took two finals today: Abstract Vector Spaces, and Languages and Computation
Erik:
– reading fictional arpanet chat
Chris:
– documenting Arduino spectrogram project
– video and blog post coming soon
– experimenting with iMovie documentary template (looks like a cool interface for helping a novice user arrange their videos)
Mark:
– loading color palettes from ColourLovers into his Spotify app
– saving to AppEngine web service via JavaScript
– now just need to make the interface prettier, then it’s releasable

Very few lines of code were written tonight, but several outlandish game mechanics were proposed, and wispy ghost tails were drawn. Discussion topics below.

hiring programmers (it’s hard to gauge qualifications without meeting in person), svg (it’s great, David is using it for a map)
“how many people have never seen an iPhone?” (who knows man? somewhere between one and five billion)
“what does the ghost of a tractor look like?” (wispy tail, transparent, angular? smooth? abstract? who knows?)
dogpark finder app, instagram, zynga (“the only reason we’re talking about them is because they had lucky timing and a big exit”)
“they don’t want to advance, they want to have an aesthetic experience” (re: ultima online folks role-playing as “boring” characters)
i wanna be the guy, super meat boy, battle girl (indie games)
“mario [physics] is earth, everything else is too floaty or … whatever” (anchoring effect)

Present: Mark, Erik, David, Jordan, Rob, Vinny
Also, Karthik and Jon were at Octane talking about video game reverse engineering before Atlhack. I caught the end of their conversation.

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).

David
– digital clay sculpting (spraying) interface
– – gyroscope data over osc to processing to control spray direction
– map of nyc from flickr photos
– – mean shift clustering
– – convex hull of clusters for image mask
Karthik
– debugging his non-rigid registration code
– – energy minimization with levenberg-marquardt in python/numpy
– – not sure if the Jacobian is correct, adding more damping
Mark
– interpreting freeform multi-touch gestures for a visual synthesizer
– – synced to music, converting into colors
– made a sketch for gradually subdividing a timeline, setting values hierarchically:

Everybody
– went to FLUX last Friday

David
– worked in Barcelona this summer
– applied for a job working on a TV show “attaching cameras to sharks and lions and stuff”
– turning fish into music (for a living)
– making visual maps of cities from pictures (master’s project)
– using python, scraped 1/2 million flickr photos

Erik
– switching to a service-oriented architecture at work
– using custom distributed messaging format/client/server
– memory efficient, simple
– used for analyzing network traffic

Karthik
– working on non-rigid registration of 3D surfaces
– doing symbolic differentiation in python

Mark
– worked in Grenoble this summer
– made multi-touch animation tools
– fixed problems with logins on Corkbird
– tiny javascript project adjproj (more explanation next week)

Discussion
– typestate, dynamic vs static typing
– python 2 vs 3
– “there’s a beneficial monoculture in the ruby community … as long as you’re developing on a mac and deploying to debian, you’re fine”