Atlhack

New Members: Mon, John, Josh

Mon
– @mon_ellis
– painter, photographer, filmmaker, artist, activist
– makes live action mixed with stop motion
– likes <a href="http://en similar al viagra.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_%C5%A0vankmajer”>Jan Švankmajer
– likes Living Walls
– uses Stop Motion Pro -> Final Cut Pro to make stop-motion films

John
– digital media strategy, social justice
– futurist, artist
– building entrepreneurial strategies around emerging technologies
– “just being curious, man”
– Dyson sphere, self-replicating robots to dismantle planets
– John Smart’s transcendence hypothesis
– Fermi’s Paradox

Josh Watts
– n-grams, shingles, fractals, mongoDB
– energy density of hydrocarbons
– thorium nuclear reactors

Karthik
– searching flow field databases
– invariances? scale?

Mark
– talking with folks
– sketching in space and time

Rob:
– prototyping an iPad game with Codea
– going to Austin this weekend
Mark:
– implementing Reaction-Diffusion Model with Interacting Turing Modes
– – videos of the results

Erik
– adding Solr (full-text search) to network event monitoring code
– Rhobbler is hobbled by an incomplete JSON API (Graham, do you know anyone we can contact at Rhapsody?)
Mark
– minimum cost matching between instantiations of a shape grammar
– fixed Corkbird bitrot
– created a customized version of Corkbird for designing swimming creatures

(Mr. ENIAC is 65 years-old today.)

Rob:
– made FWOOM for the global game jam this weekend
– build in Unity, 2D ragdoll physics, written in C#
– Mark only was able to get past three-ish levels
Diana:
– making a business card, frustrated by font choices
– started doing the codeyear.com tutorials
Mark:
– optimizing some OpenGL code
– compiling FaceTracker code
– contacted by a Japanese developer who is using the ShadowDraw code from Mark/Abhijeet/Sebastien’s vision project

David:
– over the winter break
1) his car was stolen and returned
2) he went to a music festival in mexico
– tonight: reading about kobe beef, japanese economy
Mark:
– making different particle repulse themselves
– used bad coefficients to pow, fixed!
Rob:
– wrote a (considerate) comment on a blog about user-interface, Don Norman
– playing with casio loops in Abelton
– reading game development tricks

We also talked about the Guthman Music Instrument contest, in particular, using the Kinect as a drumstick (literally).

Chris M.
– optimizing his OpenCL optical flow code (TV-L1)
– multigrid, based on matlab reference implementation
– got an 1-2 extra frames-per-second!
– needs to study for job interview next week
David S.
– making a video about his computer vision class projects (“learning portfolio”)
– “seen the promised-land, been to the mountain-top”
Mark L.
– implementing edmonds-karp graphcut method (to study for final)
– writing in python, maybe halfway done
Karthik R.
– reading about water special effects in Cinefex magazine
– working on SIGGRAPH demo ideas (on paper)

Talking about Kinect, avant garde projection mapping, semester is winding down.

Chris McClanahan
– showing us his viewercv app (on the android store)
David
– brainstorming microsoft kinect startup accelerator
Mark
– porting an old processing sketch to android
Rob
– preparing a paper submission to “Fundamentals of Digital Games”
Karthik
– banded cholesky can be done in linear time as long as the bands are equally spaced from the diagonal!

Vu Ha (New Member!)
– made of magic!
– graduated from CM program in spring
– worked on “Access” with Rob last spring
– Master’s student in CS now
– in Vision with David and Mark
– worked on SLAM with David

David
– applying for an artist residency at eyebeam in NYC
– – proposing DIY handheld RGBD camera project
– went to DC for Thanksgiving with the nuke fam
– the NYC for raucous weekend
Vu
– working on “BattleBoats” tonight
– refactored to use lockstep messaging between network clients
– went to Decatur for Thanksgiving (played Skyrim)
Rob
– GRE on Friday
– browsed Introversion Software’s source code from the Humble Bundle
– – sort of a mess, made him feel less ashamed of his own code
– went to Macon for Thanksgiving
Greg (Van Landingham)
– writing script for a puppet show at Engauge on Wednesday (the 7th)
– preparing for thesis defense in early January
– – zirconium diboride ceramics with secondary phases for oxidization resistance
– after graduation: educational science materials / tutoring / puppetering
– puppet show this Friday at the Basement in Buckhead
– – “puckin’ fuppet show” – sort of an open mike night
Karthik
– reading about vorticial smoke simulation
– lots of linear algebra today
– – Cholesky decomposition / Schur complement!!
– going to Pittsburg / CMU on Thursday
– went to Midtown/Doraville for Thanksgiving
Mark
– went to Snellville/Alpharetta for Thanksgiving
– made a Processing sketch run on his Android phone
– making a ShadowDraw implementation that (almost) runs on the phone
– going to Pittsburg / CMU on Thursday

At Octane they were playing Animal Collective, all of the old baristas (Gavin / Josh / Ben) are either working different nights or have new jobs now.
Rob suggested the name “LIAM” for this hack, as an anagram of (AI + ML). He also said something about Oasis, but not because there were any British pop-rock stars in attendance.

Fokes
– talked about medical school applications
– skin regeneration, hyperbaric oxygen chamber
– pluripotent stem cells
– veblen / giffen goods
Mark
– intersecting cylinders and triangle meshes
— for a surgery planning project
— explained the math to Fokes
Rob
– doing an objective-c tutorial
— making command line programs
– eating a king of pops that tastes like pumpkin pie
Erik
– worked on a new rhobbler
— because Rhapsody removed RSS feeds, so he’s scraping html now
— doing test-driven development, opened the site in a browser for the first time
— all the paths worked!
– living in midtown now, first atlhack in two-ish years
– taking the AI class, and ML class
— sebastian thrun’s writing is hard to understand

Octane is full tonight, we had to battle for a table.

New member: David Stolarsky
– grad student at GT, studying computer vision
– he and Mark worked on a project together
– went to Art&Code at CMU last weekend

Tonight:

Emily:
– has a new job at Ecoscorecard
— located in Inman Park
— doing Ruby web dev
– playing Glitch
— made by the original Flickr folks
— has beautiful illustrations, and an API!
John:
– working on testify
– “like Rack/WSGI for testing frameworks”
– for making all your continuous-integration/failure-notification/etc tools work with whatever wacky Ruby testing framework you’re using
Diana:
– has an internship at the Georgia Department of Economic Development
— making photos, editing photos
– bought a CF card reader to replace a lost one
– photoshopping shots of Fernbank Museum
Mark:
– preparing slides for a lecture
— for computer graphics class on Thursday (he’s the TA)
David:
– creating a poster of silhouette cutouts
— from the shadowgram project
— wrangling imagemagick
Rob:
– working on a (cooking) game that may use a two-handed input device to help elderly people retain their executive decision making skills
– showing off “My Horse”
— it’s like Tamagotchi + Farmville
– exploring procedural generated textures in Unity 3D

Also, I cleaned out the “subscribers” from the WordPress database just now, because it was mostly spam. If you’re an Atlhacker without an author account, let me (Mark) know and I’ll create an account for you.