This week’s hackfest was brought to you by the letters M and P and the number 3! Our first "podcast".
Author Archive
Hackfest Podcast
Friday, December 2nd, 2005HackFest 1110
Wednesday, November 30th, 2005Hardware hacks, info-viz, interactive systems, maps, dynamic Java, economics, politics… it all depends on who shows up.
Hackfest 1101 Postmortem
Thursday, November 17th, 2005– Since Last Hackfest
– Luke
– Lost his /usr partition
– interesting experience for scripting a debian
install using apt
– had been using unison (linux, windows, etc,
upenn.edu) for backup
– did some bluetooth exploration/debugging
– Graham
– Made emacs scripts to tally time spent on each sentence
– also did some mockups of the idea
– masters project things
– Vinny
– fixed commotion problems
– hacked javascript for work
– integrated the Rhino javascript parser into our new
platform
– Today’s Plans
– Luke
– messing with Palm memory map
– new method: allocate memory in different
applications, then see where that is in physical
memory
– going to Germany tomorrow
– Graham
– installing iTunes
– make the clocks invisible the right way
– support editing of existing sentences
– properly creating a mode instead of modifying all of
emacs
– Vinny
– either: executing scheme code for calculated properties
– or: automated population of the schools database
– Today’s Reality
– Group
– 60 minute discussion of economics of variable pricing on
iTunes
– Graham
– Worked on making clocks invisible – not done yet … ∞
loops
– Luke’s going to provide some info for minor modes
– Luke
– found some memory possibly below the OS boundary
– Vinny
– told Graham everything would be fantastic with XSLT
– looked at Grant’s latest spoontease
atlhack flickr tag
Sunday, November 13th, 2005I tagged all of my flickr photos with the tag "atlhack". No one else is currently using this tag, as you probably guessed. If you upload atlHack related photos, please tag them! This will make them all show up at http://flickr.com/photos/tags/atlhack/
About: Why
Sunday, November 13th, 2005This is probably the most important question in your tour…
Why Did You Start atlHack?
There are a lot of good reasons for starting atlHack, but there are two really big, glaring ones that need to be tackled here:
- There is no reason for computing to be a solo activity. People are social; computing should be social. To this end, we (make sure to shower,) meet up every week to talk to others face to face, drink coffee (Octane is now selling beer as well), and write about what we do. These are normal, everyday things that are surprisingly uncommon at GeorgiaTech, especially in the CoC. Come, normalize yourself – you’ll be a happier person.
- Computer Science, especially in the States, has an overwhelming monoculture. What I mean is, most people could pick a "computer person" out of crowd of people. Why is this? Everyone uses computers! And, why are there so few girls in computing? I think that the strange culture of computing is holding us all back. So, I would like to "Open Source" the computing culture of Atlanta – put it all (well, all thats appropriate) on the web, and invite everyone to join in.
Why Did I Not Start atlHack?
Ok, there’s two sides to every coin… what will make me not want to continue atlHack?
- Becoming a free computer repair shop. I’m sorry if you are having computer problems. If we’re feeling nice, we might show you the Yellow Pages. You wouldn’t expect someone to fix your car for free, please don’t ask us to solve your problems. There are companies like Geek Squad and Retrotechs that can help you out. Fixing computer problems is work, and work is not exciting. If there are people who are interested in volunteering, they will let you know.
- Becoming everyone’s soapbox. Yes, we sometimes talk about religion, politics, and Mac vs Windows vs Linux. No, I don’t want to talk about this every week – that’s boring. You’ll notice that I often say atlHack is whatever you want it to be. Well, its actually going to be whatever *I* want it to be, and a weekly yak fest is not high on my list. I’m listening for other people’s ideas, but I’ll put my own goals first. My goals are to encourage creativity, innovation, productivity, and diversity. If you are just wasting people’s time, we’re not interested.
Why Can’t You Decide How to Capitalize ATLhack?
Well, it should probably be ATLhack, since ATL is an airport code, and airport codes are uppercase, but I think that it looks a lot nicer in camelCase, and I like things that look nice. Sometimes I write ATLhack to emphasize where it referrs to, but most of the time I will use atlHack. If you see atlhack, its probably a domain name or a typo.
How Do You Say "atlHack"?
Think "paddle", without the "p". Why? I don’t know why, it just sounds better than "A, T, L, hack".
About atlHack
Sunday, November 13th, 2005| a short introduction to atlHack… |
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and then, on with the show…
College Searching w/ Google Maps Interface
Thursday, October 27th, 2005
Notes so far:
A few simple use cases:
1) Me
Looking for a masters program:
Search/sort by:
Geographic Region,
Size of the City,
Ranking of the School
2) Ben
Goes to the site because "its cool". Expects:
Get the map
Ranking slider bars
Numbered or lettered according to ranking, if there is one
otherwise
Search for the city / name, sort based on proximity
Certain sized school
Update dynamically
3) Graham
Looking for a phd program:
Search/sort using:
quality of teaching
how published / cited people are
Specifics: program keyword searches ("computer audio", etc)
Size of the city, culture of the city
4) Titus
Ratios
Looking for a grad program:
Major Specializations
Admission requirements
Average GRE
Number of students
Religious/Political Affiliations
Number of plublications (Impact factor)
Cost
If there are "out of state" benefits
Regional Weather (how cold it is)
Extracurricular activities
USNews rankings
Tiers / Risk Minimization
Undergrad:
class size
Acceptance
Retention
Average GPA
Internet Connectivity / Most Wired / Restrictions (OS, Firewalls)
A "Good" search result: 20
Search by "course", like "Semiconductors"
Biases:
Computing Platform
Research groups
vocational vs theory
political
religious
GALA
Landscape:
buildings vs trees
city vs town
Where they go after school:
Grad programs
Companies (colleges that recruiters visit)
Startups
Photos on Flickr
Thursday, October 27th, 2005My recent digital camera purchase has resulted in a stream of photographs. If they are good enough, they make it to my flickr account at http://www.flickr.com/photos/ynniv/.
Titus asked about saving photos from flicker – I think this was a ploy to get me to allow photo downloads. The default setting is to allow other flickr members, but I have switched to the Communist setting of Anonymous. Go forth and pirate my camera!
Hackfest 1001 Postmortem
Thursday, October 20th, 2005– Since Last Hackfest
– Luke
– found blurb about alpha Firefox UI feature, tabling his
firefox project
– wrote simple CLI for jhymn on Linux
– spent some time hacking a linux bootloader for palm treo
(like GARUS)
– Matt
– Idea: chronological scale for google maps
– Graham
– Went to startup school
– Is going to write it about it tomorrow (says vinny, really on the weekend)
– Ben
– More autograding stuff – added something so that it can
read in a request for a complete regrade of a test
– Made things nice and user friendly
– Vinny
– been playing with lisp/scheme, made cool drawings in
logo/scheme
– Today’s Plans
– Luke
– Website cleanup/maintenance
– play with Palm bootloader more
– Matt
– Haning out, might head home to work on PC
– Sketch user interfaces
– Graham
– Music editor is STARVING
– fixing "write with speedup"
– Ben
– Write something to let the TA run a specific method
– Vinny
– muck around with scheme/logo more
– Today’s Realities
– Matt
– on vague timeline-animated-map-idea: babysteps, in the
form of touching base on java(?) and GIS
– Also: brainstorming on a slick name, with approriately
pretentious allusion
– Luke
– Got website things done. TikiWIki updated.
– mail organizing and DHCP debugging via packet sniffing
– Graham
– Defeated the System.EngineExecutionException by
reorganizing variables… marshalling issue?
– still buggy, tho
– Ben
– Reorganized some code
– read a lot of PhD Comics.com
– Vinny
– learned the shape of a nautilus shell
– wrote some scheme/logo to draw one
Hack Fest 111
Wednesday, October 5th, 2005the curtain of night;
visions of caffiene, laptops.
hacking the planet