Author Archive

Hackfest 1010001 Mortem

Wednesday, August 1st, 2007

31 July 2007 – three atlhackers and a telegoogler

Since Last Time-
Mark- continued on quest to make a cabal package for Wiimote.
Porting Obj-C program that uses Mac IO-Bluetooth framework.
Read about arrows.
Graham- went to the UK. Picked figs. Signed first boob.
Performed first Spark! night at Parkgrounds, with a new wiimote piece.
Stuart- fabrication is finished for the month. Testing the chips that you made.
Reading about using information theory to construct optimal stock portfolio.
Dressed up as Mustapha Mond for a party, ended up Hand in Hand.

Alex called, doing well at Google in Mountain View. He’s meeting a poetry-bot dude there (Gnoetry).

Tonight’s Plan-
Mark- making a package for Wiimote.
Graham- try to delete n/a spam ghosts.
 -see if I can get Haskell-sc working on windows.

Results-
Mark helped Graham get haskell SC3 running. It’s working!

Hackfest 1001100 Postmortem

Thursday, June 28th, 2007

26 June 2007 – strawberry-rhubarb pie night
music: early ambient works from Aphex Twin

New atlhacker- Stuart Duerson
phd student in ECE! he makes nano electromechanical components!
microelectromechanical components, resonators
chemical detectors
also Dr. Electroboink, noted atlanta musicians
has designed costumes for the Shithouse kids

new random person! – Melissa, who is a BME student

Since Last Week-
Stuart- went to France and Switzerland for conferences and research
Will- is reading Crossing the Chasm, he recommends to learn startup business technology
Alex- got a paper accepted to Mobile HCI! Maybe Singapore.
 taught camp! bought running shoes.
Miriam- will be riding alex’s coattails to Singapore. went to Athens!
 convinced people to paint the house yellow and lime green.
 started reading What is the What?
 got Peyton through 2/3 of reading list, including 4 book reports
Graham- got into grad school. got running shoes. made pies.
Mark- bought a wiimote and made it play chuck music! and make pretty graphics.
 ran by the railroad tracks: http://www.gmap-pedometer.com/?r=1085003

This Week-
Stuart- arranged a JAM
Will- reading Crossing the Chasm
Alex- thinking about Haskell, and sending people copies
Miriam- online stuff, then reading!
Graham- looking into bluetooth for thinkpad
Mark- talking about information design

Design of a color plate friendly book binding – transparent press.

Hackfest 1001011 Mortem

Wednesday, June 20th, 2007

19 June 2007 – Haskellnacht

new people:
Matt – Alex’s friend enrolling in MS mechanical engineering.
Asok – dude from the information retrieval company.

Since Last Week-
Mark- performed at electro-music 2007! learned chuck, wrote chuck bluegrass
 -writing code to fold fabric in processing
 -ran with Graham to Decatur
Greg- measured the volume of powder with helium gas
Alex- built first interactive demo of spelling correction on java + twidor
 -exported classifier from WEKA, hooked it all up.
 -hard part was python file wrapping up feature data and feed to classifier
 -camp! teaching kids the python.
Will- to be hired by a contracting company working for a beverage company
 -programmed a genetic algorithm in MATLAB, optimized a 1d cellular automata
 -optimized it by feedback, how long a human would watch it
 -reading Kurzweil’s The Singularity is Near
Graham- added live performance sampling stuff to Mused

This week-
Mark- learning Haskell
Alex- learning Haskell
Graham- learning Haskell
Will- reading Kurzweil

we were using GHC and The Gentle Introduction to Haskell

Hackfest 1001010 Postmortem

Wednesday, May 30th, 2007

29 May 2007 – everybody was sad in middle school

Mark is listening to Amadou et Miriam – the blind couple from Mali
mesons – groups of two quarks, baryons – groups of three
flavors – up, down, top, bottom, strange, charm

Since Last Time-
Erik- company didn’t go public. will implement memcache. amazon ec2 – virtual hosting API.
Alex- getting ready for summer camp.
 -learned Scratch– it’s obvious, least astonishment, can make complex animations.
 -doesn’t give you structured procedures as in logo.
Graham- added ChucK export to Mused.
Jason- qaboom may be bought by inquus.
Will- knees undergoing cellular reconstruction. helped build a pergola.
 -read The Long Tail, would recommend it for a quick read.
 -Why Google is important, Amazon vs B&N, etc.
Mark- made triangle grids with the wrong irrational numbers.

Tonight-
Will- going to write Excel sheet for aiding irrigation system design. reading Brief History of Time.
Erik- finishing his coffee and going home.
Graham- will add a configurable range filter for loudness. ask UI advice.
Jason- is giving a demo tomorrow, will work on his codebase.
Mark- will fix his triangle grids of different sizes.
Alex- package up last release of JES. bug free trademark.

Hackfest 1001001 Postmortem

Sunday, May 20th, 2007

19 May 2007 – atlhack special edition

Since Last Meeting-
Grant- has been working on 4-D cities.
Vinny- hacking python scripts for user interface of navigation system.
Mark- hacked into nodebox and added some callbacks.
Alex- hacked Twidor to collect data for study.
Graham- wrote a new chuck piece.
Zack- finishing school in a week! going to GHP for math
Sonali- got a job with Sita! (and a laptop?)

Today’s progress-
Graham- added timing stats for queries. adding labels for axes.

other interesting people who showed up:
Alex Grey- computing psuedo potentials for particles.
Matt Gilbert- will be putting up videos of Sonic Generator soon!
Jessica Sherwood- planning the future of Atlanta new music!
Zach’s dad!
John Croft IV – database development guru

Hackfest 1001000 Postmortem

Wednesday, May 16th, 2007

16 May 2007 – short early meeting

Graham had to come early because of a show in East Atlanta with Rob.
(not sure who may have shown up later)

The Updates:
Mark- writing matlab code for cellular automata with Will.
 We discussed optimizing matlab code- perhaps the best gains can be had by preallocating arrays, and by eliminating loops- vectorizing them- by turning them into computations over vectors and matrices. There is a good collection of resources here.
Mark also made an animated visualization of the elementary CA zoo here:
http://notlime.com/2007/automata/one_dimensional.html
Besides that, he sent me lots of links on DBM datastructures like B-trees and R-trees.

Graham- got Mused to support zooming.

Post updates if you get a chance!

Hackfest 1000111 Mortem

Tuesday, May 8th, 2007

8 May 2007 – well-oiled servers

New member: Joe!
he is a cofounder of We The Citizens.
Niche Technology with Paul Royal- online convention registration software.
(Mitch Halpin, Gallagher Prior, tech CS peeps)

Since Last Week:
Mark- hung out at some awesome parties. Tina’s chicken party, Puyan’s graduation party.
Alex- started work on a journal article for mini-querty!
Will- in charge of designing fluid pumping system.
Graham- submitted first computer music paper on Mused!

Tonight:
Mark- japanese notecards for adjectives.
Alex- working on an improved google widget todo list!
Will- is reading A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.
Joe- perhaps will drink a few beers.
Graham- gonna try the new audicle, make a screencast. learning LiSa!

Martin’s poetry-bot sent us a poem: "gunwales"

all those times

i’m suddenly in motion through
the back carefully, drain,
add cream and worn gunwales, the wrong windows

you will come closer. this is
your story; you have learned these words
than you the pocked road
to yourself out to her.
some form of backed-up drains, too

Hackfest 1000110 Mortem

Tuesday, May 1st, 2007

01 May 2007 – atlhack, your connection machine

met AJ, grading papers – grading papers for intro to MBA at UPhoenix. "Born to Party" t-shirts

Sonali means like Gold! Tejus means bright like the sun!
Graham’s name means "gravel area" or "grey homestead".
Mark means a dot on a plot or visualization. Will means great protector.

Since Last Week-
Will- job search stuff, met with Coke people. debugged BASIC for running beverage dispenser, with a Y2K bug, doesn’t deal with the midnight wrap. now it uses millisec since 1901.
-finished with reading Jason’s entrepreneuring books.
Mark- made bricks in nodebox. wants to make cornered bricks.
-doing visualization for high dimensional dataset.
-was chased by a Jeep and slammed his finger in a door.
-met Jay Jackson, a Qaboomer, starting brewpot.com
Tejus and Sonali- got highlights in their hair.
Graham- got dynamic queries working on the max pitch class profile.

Mark likes Mira Nair imdb wp documentaries and dramas, movies about Bombay street kids.

Graham
-loves Mark Guzdial’s blog on CS education- GOTO considered useful for learning.
John Maeda – artist at media lab – advisor to Processing. He used to write programs without loops.
Functional languages do not perhaps support the tracing-through metaphor of languages.

Tonight-
Will- is reading the Connection Machine, after having a parallel processing discussion with Mark.
Mark- working on building walls and brick houses.
Tejus- wants to learn how to use Rake (ruby build tool) more effectively.
Sonali- Mark will help Sonali prepare for an interview which requires three years of javascript.
Graham- finishing up his first draft of the paper.
Emily- is really busy and doing finals.

Hackfest 1000101 Postmortem

Wednesday, April 25th, 2007

24 April 2007 – mike is here!

Tejus- worked on PostGres triggers.
Sonali- has two job interviews (Sita and Lancorp).
Mark- new varied forms, performed with Pitfalls at Nophest.
Graham- adding range filters to Mused, will write an ICMC paper.
Puyan- won the Maribeth Gandy award for chuck composition.
Mike- wrote an ableton song without listening to it.

Hackfest 1000100 Postmortem

Wednesday, April 18th, 2007

17 April 2007 – beautiful night

new person – j5 jony5.com
 
Since Last Week-
Erik- needs some dsp on his sensors. changed name of project to knowent- knowledge from enterprises. doing some graphic design.
Graham- segmented a song and put it into a sqlite database with features.
 -first version of an interactive plotter for personal sample libraries.
 -found Zotero, a research library organizer built into firefox.
Mark- dogwood festival, dancing loca luna, dancing agnes scott, reading and sleeping outside.
Alex- worked on SWIMM! fixing dictionaries for lookups in java or python. Find words that start with a stem. dictionaries need frequency counts.
Miriam- "teaching to transgress" to Cobb co preschoolers.
Gregg- graduating soon! will work in materials lab over the summer.

This Week’s Plans-
Zach- hanging out!
Erik- adding PageRank tracking, search term ranking.
Graham- going to decode segments to disk so maybe they will play correctly. and they did!
Mark- make nodebox by calling objective C? gonna do some nodebox.
Alex- talking? working on new blogging extension?
Miriam- reading how to subvert tomorrow’s minds.
Gregg- needs to do his application for grad school.

Flash competitors – MS has Silverlight, Adobe has Apollo