Atlhack

Notes!

Lindsey:
– 8 work days left before summer vacation
– – down to 6 things on The Todo List That Refused To Die
– found an apartment in Bloomington!
– *still* chipping away at SICP

Martin:
– working on apparent (http://apparentaa.appspot.com/)
– that’s about it

Ashok:
– working on study guide flash-card app
– on own server
– lots of reading to understand algorithms: general techniques to optimize people’s retention

Alex:
– looked "A Fast Algorithm for Learning a Ranking Function from Large-Scale Data Sets"
– it’s got a lot of math
– started working on online course: http://www.stats202.com
– little bit of Scheme with Lindsey
– dithering around on the internets

Mark:
– hiking the AT

Humza:
– lots of rock climbing, hands are tired
– thinking about getting into Python

New Member: Dustin
– went to school at RISD
– rock-climbs with Humza
– joking about a movie where:
– – a man who burns other people’s copies of comics to make his copy more rare
– making Flash animations for Intel + Beijing Olympic ads
– partway through watching tekkonkinkreet

Drew:
– trying to get on the network
– getting into AMQP
– – similar to JMS (which he uses at work)
Lindsey:
– 13 work days left before summer vacation
– – down to 8 things on The Todo List That Refused To Die
– looking for an apartment in Bloomington!
– still chipping away at SICP
– – trying to finish chapter 1 exercises by the end of the month
Martin:
– working on Tyrus’s “flipping coasts” app
– – for keeping in touch with people after he moves
Erik:
– wrote code for adding negative captchas to rails apps
– not as excited by phusion passenger as tejus is
Rob:
– configuring his (thinkpad-mac) to do japanese (kotoeri) input
– ã?Œã‚“ã?°ã?£ã?¦ï¼?
Alex:
– reading Graham’s DAFX paper
– can’t do classloading (which jython needs) in an applet
– – wrote a blog post about it
– – to which Frank W. (big Jython guy at Sun)
– wrote some schema
– thinking metrics for how good a regression fit is
Ashok:
– says that Knuth doesn’t believe in unit-tests
Mike:
– researching how to get high-speed internet to his rural small-town
– – so that his younger brother can be part of internetdom
Mark:
– reading Graham’s DAFX paper
– chattering

New Member: Dan
– industrial engineering student at tech
– building an app for airline scheduling
– asking about jsp,php,java,ruby-on-rails

Zach
– working on a reading aid for ADD folks
– displays a file and highlights groups of words at a time
– – to prevent distraction
– – it’s written in swing
– – based on ideas from a speed-reading app
Tejus
– worked on server config for choices-quilts
– installed ruby on centos 4
Sonali
– working on the new rails version of choices-quilts
– having trouble with the “will_paginate” plugin
Lindsey
 – went to my college reunion in Iowa
– – saw family, saw friends, saw Alex, video blogged about it
 – learned about the law of “conservation of ream” from my Harvey Mudd
alum housemate
 – won NaRoRuMo 2008
 – finally making headway on SICP again; end of chapter 1 in sight
Rob
– being quiet
Martin
– working on apparent (the apartment finder)
– going to keep the birthdate of the craigslist posts
– – rather than repull listings from the database at each step
Mark
– researching datetime formatting and parsing
– – found a bunch of libraries in python/perl/javascript
– is going to write some code for parsing English text
– – representing repeated date events (like, every Tuesday from 8 to midnight)
Erik
– maintaining code, yay?
Alex
– working on the jython-in-an-applet-talking-to-javascript project
– – can call from js to applet, and back
– – but keeps getting security exceptions

Other people at Octane: Humza, Ashok, Ashok’s brother (Alok), Samir, Alice, Mike, Dan
Alok is taking the JES class with Monica Sweat
Discovered that Ashok (and Alok) are not Indian, but Nepali

Two New Members!
Ashok (with a silent “H”)
– co-worker of Humza and Cary Hull
– making a website for studying/memorizing
– – will use spaced repetition to pick flashcards to show
Mike
– co-worker of Ashok
– learning AppEngine
– – looking at using Exhibition with AppEngine

Scott Driscoll (previously)
– writing Matlab code for a freelance project
– has been selling robotics kits to Make magazine
Lindsey
– work: daily insane perl refactoring sprees
– running: daily
– – on track to hit 100 miles for the month
– should perhaps consider occasionally doing things other than work and running
Alex
– stretch goal: put a python REPL into a browser using jython and an applet
– – talked with Lex Spoon about this
– talking with Zach about compilers and byte-code interpreters
– running daily
Rob
– wrote an outline of making the wiibow
– – with glovepie + puredata
– organizing his workflow paradigm desktop
Martin
– hacking on apparent
– – improving query performance by indexing apartments geohash (not the xkcd geohash)
Mark
– trying to make Processing allow Java 1.5 syntax
– – getting segfaults
– should have stuck to playing with geomerative
– biked to Stone Mountain yesterday
– made tiny animations in Flash and Photoshop

Erik:
– used jQuery for ALOE, impressed
– needed client-side autocompleter
– “the jQuery plugin idea is very nearly perfect”
Lindsey:
 – helped throw a surprise birthday party
 – went to the Obama rally in Portland with 75,000 people (video)
 – voted
 – did a little more SICP, has been on a plateau for a while, though
 – last day at job will be June 27 (but certainly not counting, or anything)
Alex:
– sudoku solver
– flashes of love for statically typed languages
– app for keeping track of lines-written-per-day
Martin:
– got the apartment finder running on appengine
– bulk uploader for pushing craigslist data into datastore
– trouble with db.TextProperty
Rob:
– stumbling towards objective-c
– – going to make 1337 iPhone apps that do musical things
– air violin, wiibow
– at panopticon-esque job, did web surfing in lynx
Mark:
– getting familiar with geomerative
– nowhere near “materializing” fonts yet
– needs to make some additional geometric datastructures

Humza:
– went rockclimbing for the first and second times
– it’s zen, sections of rock are “problems” that you “solve”
Lindsey:
– secretly: went on a secret journey, that nobody knows about,
because it’s secret
– calculated the hundred millionth Fibonacci number!:
http://code.google.com/p/narorumo/wiki/ReallyBigFibonacciNumbers
– can’t stop thinking about integer sequences
Martin:
– started posting the “apparent” housing finder to appengine,
– made it all ajaxy
– started designing an icon (to rule the world)
Lauryn:
– catching up on work
– reading “do androids dream of electric sheep”
– got a bicycle and a haircut
Alex:
– sudoku solver
– gearsing, going to use svn revision number instead of md5
– hung out in portland with lindsey
– did math together, from sicp
Erik:
– got rid of appcelerator from skribit
– widget went from 300Kb to 6Kb
Mark:
– using geomerative to render fonts,
– found and fixed a geomerative/mac issue,
– is going to “materialize” fonts: make them melt like wax, inflate like ballons, etc

Mark:
– sketching in processing
Martin:
– writing javascript for apparent
Alex:
– impemention knuth’s dancing links algorithm (for sudoku)

Alex:
– python sudoku solver on google appengine
Lindsey:
 – went to the Stumptown Comics Fest (ed. beautiful website!)
– – bought comics
– – listened to interesting talks
– – posted some pictures and choice quotations
– announced my impending resignation from my job
– solved a problem in some perl code at work:
– – two bugs were interacting in such a way as to make each other invisible
– – because data was being duplicated in places where it wasn’t supposed to be
– – and the duplication of information made the bug harder to track down
– – for the same reasons that non-normalized databases are vulnerable to errors
– and now I have a project idea: a Data::Doctor module
– – that looks through people’s data structures
– – for telltale signs of redundancy and encourages good data hygiene
Erik:
– ansley park hexagonal tiles add flavor to 8-mile runs
– looking for new residence
Martin:
– worked on “apparent” – the apartment finder
– walked mark through installing django,setuptools,gcc,simplejson on “atlanta”
Rob:
– has OS X running on his thinkpad
– rediscovering the command line
– installing kernel extension and crossing-fingers
– getting Wiimote running (maybe DarwiinRemote)
Mark:
– made conceptual art, for instructionset

New Member: Megan
– student at SCAD-Atlanta
– – roommate of Anna Marie
– designs clothes
– – gothic lolita and other japanese fashion
– has a ganguro friend in alabama

What we’ve been doing
Megan:
– translating blogs
– writing midterms
Anna Marie:
– midterms
Erik:
– tried five things, ended up reverting all of them
– – “i guess my head’s not very clear”
– added a calendar to aloe
– – for bills and invoices
Martin:
– recentering the apartment-finder map
Mark:
– released a new version of the Eclipse plugin at work
– writing pseudocode for an asynchronous language for building interfaces
Alex:
– sudoku solver in python
– – his python is better than two years ago
– gears-ing his app at work

Drew + Patrick:
– competed in pyweek (stochasm)
– starting to design a pure-python physic engine: “homebrew”
Sonali:
– getting the css right on the tejus/sonali project
– – an svn browser “like collaboa, but appcelerated”
– – svn bindings are painful to deal with
Tejus:
– screwed around with heroku (rails hosting)
– – trying to upload/run an appcelerator project
– friended kevin whinnery on the appcelerator dev network
Lindsey:
– went to japan, sapporo, tokyo, learned kanji and kana
– – there are lots of loan words “energy”, “handle”
– – for things that you’d think a native word must exist for
– did some sicp problems
Alex:
– went to japan, sapporo, tokyo, learned spoken japanese and a pun
– – only works at an indian restaurant:
– – Q: “nan desu ka?” A: “hai, nan desu!”
– – Q: “what is this?” / “is this nan-bread?” A: “yes, it is what!” / “yes, it is nan-bread!”
– did something python related
– – used the unittest framework
– started reading “all of statistics” in earnest
Anna Marie:
– new quarter: reading, writing, art-history
– awesome new roommate: a japanese aficionado
Erik:
– wrote a blog post on enterprise-resourse-planning
– having a meeting this week about spinning his project off into a new company
Cary:
– competed in pyweek
– finished his “anarchic noun-space browser/builder”
– is excited by google app engine, disparaging of pylons
Mark:
– competed in pyweek
– ported python-appcelerator to run on google app engine
– refactoring/fixing pyweek code
Martin:
– working on his gmaps housing-finder mash-up
– drawing circles to limit search