Author Archive

Atlhack Prehistory

Saturday, April 15th, 2006

Not sure if these were the first formal meetings, but there were a few summer meetings at Graham’s house.

Friday 18 Mar 2005 (vinny’s notes)
–  Last hackday
     –  Graham
         –  Basic direct sound functionality – loading, playing
         –  Loaded MP3’s and played them
     –  Vinny
         –  Managed to do nothing.
         –  BEEP has no complete implementation in .Net
         –  I’ve decided to use Java
         –  I want to make a prodcedural game
–  Today’s Plans
     –  Graham
         –  basic decoding in Bass
     –  Vinny
         –  Finally make a BEEP app, in Java this time
             –  Do it in eclilpse
         –  Brainstorm game ideas
–  Today’s Reality
     –  Graham
         –  Managed to decode a whole MP3 and rewrite to raw PCM, load in editor
             –  Works grrrrrreat!
         –  No FFT analysis yet
     –  Vinny
         –  Configured eclipse
             –  learned about the workspace, and projects
             –  played with the visual editor for 2 seconds, before
                   it crashed
         –  created a project called BeepMe, for chatting
             –  imported beepcore Jars
         –  Pirated a beep sample code to do something
             –  runs a server – does the slowest ping ever.
–  General Ideas
     –  We’re going to take hackday notes
     –  we want our server!
         –  running social networking goodies
         –  be a place to leave notes, code
         –  we need a domain… looking for ideas.  hackatl?
               atl-hack?
Friday, 20 May 2005
–  Since Last Hackday
    –  Graham
    –  Vinny
        –  Gotten bounce to work
            –  Currently bouncing on 3d needs 2d sqare
            –  ODE works great
–  Today’s Plans
    –  Graham
        –  Auditory Masking
        –  GUI – plugging segmentation algo w/ sequence editing
              interface
    –  Stephen
        –  Has a prime number generator in "Processing" (java subset)
            –  speed optimization and graphic scaling – run forever
    –  Joel
        –  Max/MSP
            –  Patch takes the difference of sequential notes
                –  attempting a call and response behavior
            –  Integrating two keyboards and creating harmony
            –  "Well tempered scale, here I come!"
            –  Creating a continuous (vs discrete) music theory
    –  Grant
        –  The return of spoon tease!
            –  A procedural world, a la the demo scene
            –  the end result – a Primer (Stephenson) or game (Scott
                  Card)
            –  Joel says: "Schrödinger’s spoon"
    –  Vinny
        –  Hacking MIDI into windowed electropaint
–  Today’s Reality
    –  Listened to 4 WHOLE EPISODES of Coverville.  It r0x0rs.  So
          does Rodeohead
    –  Graham
        –  Did a little temporal masking
        –  No success with acoustic / instantaneous masking
    –  Stephen
        –  It scrolls!
        –  and runs! continuously!
    –  Grant
        –  Laptop isn’t dealing with opengl, fell back on 2d spoon
              tease generation
    –  Vinny
        –  Struggled to get electrpaint in a widnow, no success yet
        –  Didn’t touch MIDI
    –  Joel
        –  Got inconstant results from Max/MSP
        –  Learned oodles of Max shortcuts

Friday, 8 July 2005

atlhack.org is up in a rudimentry fashion.  I’m waiting on a public IP
from my ISP for a full rollout, but I have a stub page up.  Send me a
link and a picture if you want to be added to it, or if you want me to
change what I have up there.

– Vinny

Hackfest 11110 Mortem

Thursday, April 13th, 2006

13 April 2006 – "many new people"

since last week + everything else:

isiah (new)
-grad studying business intelligence at GSU
-has worked for equifax writing assembly score code
-works and has worked on several data mining projects

robert! (new) – rmccurdy.com
-from the weather channel
-automated timestamp date verification using scripted gOCR
-wants a job in network security – email him at rmccurdyjob@yahoo.com
-likes reason and tracker software

john (new)
-major work projects:
-decoding fighter pilot network messages to human readable format (at GTRI)
-using PlaceLab + wifi for location on portables
-cellphone based location schedule learning w/ Jeremy
-working for Windows Mobile this summer
-side projects he’ll send to me by email

emily (new)
-email and myspace at octane
-going to study divinity at Candler theology school
-wants an even mix of spirituality and behavioral techniques in counseling
-reading, softball, art & music appreciation, blogging

alex
-groovy scripts to sox convert and tag mp3s
-registered for classes
-introduced Vinny to Milhouse, the AquaMOOSE poetry bot
(he has written two poetry robots!)

luke
-google "luke is retarded"
-worked on caching style – assume static unless it needs to be dynamic
-eclipse-rhino – evaluation goes to standard console, and added a JS alert

vinny (on his 2nd startup)
-got rails dev environment running
-implemented a custom attribute accessor
-started writing a document on why you should learn lisp + how to do it at work
-reading A Security Kernel Based on Lambda Calculus – Rees ’96

graham
-reworking my workhorse arpeggiation code scale.ck
-SWIMM debugging arrrgh
-waiting for details of potential future employer

erik
-redid subwindow.com
-wp_thin – a minimal AJAX-safe wordpress renderer
-subwey – wrote a guided websurfing client

Hackfest 11101 Postmortem

Thursday, April 6th, 2006

6 April 2006, Tonight was low-key:

Graham gave his presentation on ChucK for Music tonight at dorkbot-atlanta. He also worked on a ChucK music tutorial which he neglected to mention at the talk, but is linked to from his chuck-notes page.

Copresenters: Philip Galanter spoke about generative art, as in "Complexity is in between structure and randomness." Boryana Rossa talked about Robot Revolutions, the social dynamics necessary for robots to be truly intelligent and free.

Vinny recorded the talk, which will be up in some form soon. He has been working on ultra secret startup stuff. And cannot disclose it. But someday he will be your boss.

We had the pleasure of talking with Amanda, a neurochemist writing a musical about stem-cell ethics and zombies, and Justin, a CS theoretician making swift progress on fast-mixing markov chain volume approximations. He also wrote a nethack variant at some point.

Hackfest 11100 Mortem

Thursday, March 30th, 2006

30th March 2006 – "Hola, atlhaqueros!"

Since Last Week:

Josh (n00b)
-author of previously featured JoshPOV blog
-avid wayfaring user: Josh’s Maps of Atlanta and elsewhere
-working on Tech Campus Map GMaps overhaul
-works with Graham at GTRI

Stephen
-school projects in progress:
1. Wikipedia Article on Data Integration (for Databases)
2. Graph-based Matrix Reordering to minimize fill-in on Gaussian Elimination (Sparse Matrices)
3. An improved Kalman Filter using Incomplete Matrix Factorizations (Machine Learning)

Martin
-hacking the GPU to compute silhouettes (for cell shading)
-designing the class interface for ChucK binary IO

Vinny
-looked into eclipse plugin API, looks hairy (SWT is Not Swing)
-custom graphics programming for commotion
-touched up original concept idea for Sonic Boom ChucK

Alex
-made the Never button work in SWIMM
-played Tekken5, visited Tim

Erik
-improved subwindow.com
-with AJAX history framework (works with Safari)

Luke
-reviewed his old SWT hack so he can reapply it
-got WXGA resolution MythTV working

Graham
-submitted ChucK instanceof patch
-needs to prepare for upcoming dorkbot talk
dorkbot-atl presentation next Thursday at 7pm!

Tonight’s Reality:

Luke+Vinny
-started working on a Rhino console, dumps output

Graham
-setup MikTeX and tex2html on RENODAKOTA (laptop)
-started to write supplemental material for presentation
-started to write his first literate programs program

Erik
-familiarizing himself with javascript prototyping

Alex
-worked on packaging SWIMM
-packaging Java in OSX may be difficult, he shall overcome

Hackfest 11011 Mortem

Thursday, March 23rd, 2006

23 March 2006 – Yuppie Ghetto (Midtown) Superstars

Since Last Week:

Vinny
-(Google Maps) KML export in Blender
-Better mock up of his target UI for Commotion
-ordered atlhack.org stickers! request yours soon!

Graham
-has a working proof-of-concept => instanceof operator. Needs to fix a few bugs.
-wants to come up with a => music tutorial.
-recorded some songs with => last weekend.

Luke
-worked on his MythTV box (svn-20+)
-helping create debian packages for deployment.
-wrote a PHP program that checks out svn source and deploys on website.

This Week Reality:

Vinny
-dabbled in adding Guile hooks to =>
-integrating Rhino and js hooks into Eclipse, true runtime language in Eclipse (w/ Luke)

Luke
-planned Crawfish boil (w/ Graham)
-Rhino+Eclipse (see above)

Graham
-debugged his patch for instanceof
-used ‘diff -ur’ to make a patch of this
-will use the patch to build a wrapper for STK instruments
-wrote outline for => music web tutorial

Hackfest 11010 Mortem

Thursday, March 16th, 2006

Hackfest 11010 – 8 PMish, 16 March 2006 – A Code Knitting Circle

Since last week-

links: eigenradio, a singular christmas

Eric
www.subwindow.com
-GSU student, also works full-time
-worked on Breakout Pro, messageboard features
-working on a web based IDE for php "wide".

Andrew
yellowderby.hackmode.org
-graduated from Tech in Aerospace, works with student publications
-writing a free ESL dictionary, will finish before he reaches 39
-ESL is unique (different from EFL) because it is for speakers in an English-speaking country and must incorporate lots of cultural context

Alex
sudoku solver in python
-went looking for Common Lisp GUIs, found LTK

Luke
-posted patch for Linux kernel for his keyboard

Vinny
-hacking commotion GUI, saved window state and added text labels
-visited UIUC in Champagne-Urbana
-used Shark (for profiling) and Quartz Debug (shows UI framerate and updates)

Graham
-gave a talk to Jason Freeman’s computer music class
-will give a better presentation to April 6 dorkbot-atl
-started attempting to add ‘instanceof’ operator to ChucK
-hasn’t looking into colocating
-hasn’t sent queries to huge emacs list yet

This week:

Graham
-SWIMM – spinning off modified "extract" binary
-making signal features that update at non-import times

Erik
-working on "wide", his web-based IDE

Alex
-ripping out inference engine from poetry bot
-wants it to learn more on its own

Luke
-messing with Guile, plans to use for his revisionist filesystem
-investigate creating services with SMS for timekeeping application
-can’t find a way to run a system process in Guile

Vinny
-will get the stickers in the right format

Andrew
-developing his process for the dictionary which would include:
   -scanning in books via OCR
   -need to find tools for tagging and annotating the words

Today’s realities:

Andrew
-working on grad school apps

Alex
-brainfried, reading Hume

Erik
-added ability to save files

Graham
-one-off modification of marsyas "extract" binary via #ifndef
-refactored some of the extraction code

Luke
-figured out how to communicate with process in Guile
-posix-like: you must use fork and exec
-going to write some wrapper code for it

Vinny
-got the pdf for the stickers, will send them out soon

Hackfest 11001 Postmortem

Friday, March 10th, 2006

9 March 2006, 9ish at Octane

Before the meeting, Graham attended dorkbot-atl-3, Luke caught a flight from Louisiana, and Joel taught a climbing class. Vinny was taking a breather to prepare for a weekend trip.

News and updates:

Luke
 – worked on revamping his wiki and blog.
 – is looking for a good place to buy crawfish in Atlanta.
Joel
 – getting to know his Microkorg synth better. Wants to get max/msp.
Graham
 – will present some ChucK music at Jason’s computer music class.
 – is frequently offended by art theory.
 – wants to write program 100 for LiteratePrograms, will settle for 114.

This was a low key night of discussion and philosophy.

startup school notes

Saturday, March 4th, 2006

I never actually typed up my notes from Startup School, but you can see notes and get audio on the presentations here: Startup School Presentations
Olin Shivers talk was especially excellent.
There is also a Startup Wiki for interested tech entreprenuers.

allanfemistoreinc is a spambot

Saturday, March 4th, 2006

user allanfemistoreinc is a spambot. I blocked him.

Hackfest 10110 Mortem

Thursday, February 16th, 2006

16 Feb 2006 – Smash the Monoculture!

Joel’s sketchbook technique-
Write subsequent ideas orthagonal to connected ideas.

Since Last Week:
-Graham
Fixed a UI issue with SWIMM.
ChucK listservs.
-Vinny
Released v0.5.1 of Commotion. Documentation forthcoming.
-Joel
Potential art-book-distribution hookup.
-Luke
1. Finished up instructions to do various things with linux on treo
2. Started to look at nethack and fuse.  i’ve decided that i should port my nethack code to guile and make fuse connections to guile.  next is to look for a rule engine for guile/scheme.  if one doesnt exist, i may start writing one.
3. Started to look at rhino the Java/Javascript engine for eclipse enhancements.
4. Pondered the idea of an eclipse plugin to develop/deploy/debug firefox extensions.

This week:
-Graham
Work on clocks.
-Vinny
Fix texture scrolling in his demo.
-Joel
Read Microkorg manual.
-Luke
Cleaning up my filesystem and trying out a guild tutorial about linking to C programming.

Actually:
-Graham
Reading autoarg.el (obscure) as an example of an emacs minor mode.
Getting my clocks code running again, it’s gotten crusty since December.
-Vinny
Having trouble getting the texture phase to stop jumping.
-Joel
Made some sketches concerning symbolic representation of identity.
Learned much about his synthesizer – n with a line over it is an M.
Learned about patching capabilities, LFOs, and EGs (envelope generators).

music: an Of Montreal and Rolling Stones and Shins playlist, courtesy of Octane