Archive for the ‘Brain Candy’ Category

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.

special cases of bipartite matching

Wednesday, May 23rd, 2007

programming new variants on bipartite matching at work.  fun stuff.  film at 11.

The Internet Is Epic

Tuesday, February 13th, 2007

I’ve been trying to figure out what this video actually says. All that I’ve come up with is that it gives me a vague sense of hope about the possibilities of the Internet, but it is not a very meaty intellectual chunk. I feel that this could have been a short film about the wonders of flint, and that as long as it is set to a techno sound track with clever editing it will give the viewer a vague impression of a message. The message being "Humans Rule."

I mean to belittle neither flint nor the Internet, but I feel that more should and could be said about the Internet. Sure the Internet is a fast communications network, and we’ve never had anything like it before. People are communicating on a mass scale never before seen. That is the "What." I don’t feel that any assertions were actually made about how the speed, and massive size of this communication is effecting culture.

Here is a different video.
I think I tend to agree with the response. On the whole I feel like not all that much has changed.
However, this is coming from someone who grew up with the Internet.

I will make an assertion of my own:
Whatever ‘sea-change’ is/was/will be upon us with regard to the Internet, it will not be extensively commented on by members of my generation. Yes the Internet is a good tool, but it is as much a matter of course as the automobile. With respect to the life of the heart we’ve been the same old humans from antiquity until now.

Hackfest 101110.1 Postmortem – Blast from the past.

Friday, December 15th, 2006

Its late and Graham owes me a punch in the stomach, but I hope this is a case of better late than never!  From 8-17-2006

This Past Week:

Graham:

  • Try to use more sample in chuck environment in preparation for a Laptop Battle.
  • Started some work towards a collaborative chuck site.

Alex:

  • Borrowed a twiddler and had some fun. — Hopefully the arm is much better now?

Luke:

  • Some PVR work with mythtv.

That Night…

Alex and Graham:

  • A refocus on research.
  • Determine some mechanisms to test whether the application is choosing good sequences.

Luke:

  • Some webserver configuration to make services accessible from the office. Specifically I installed and started using Anyterm.

Hackfest 110101 Mortem

Thursday, December 14th, 2006

14 December 2006 – dj night again!

new member profile:
Jason Ho –
qaboom.com – Question and answer community for colleges
– ie "how to change folder colors in unix terminal, top five roadtrip movies, risks of eating preservatives, lucky buddha on 10th street hit or miss"
Ti calculator community- Alien Invation – Legend of Zelda clone
went to Small Business Administration today for startup advice
They suggest you start with a partnership agreement.

He added admin area to his site this week.
Tonight he’s doing formatting for the tag browsing

Jason learned from working out-
he finds that you plateau for muscle groups- switching activities helps you mitigate this.

Mark-
learned Hirigana- lifted rubberized weights at SAC.
Implemented decision trees.
Will do a flickr photo presentation, and a shapes livecoding at New Year’s Eve.
Playing with idea of physical sorters, decision trees.

Erik-
will build a webapp for ilovesittingonchairs.com
rapid rails prototyping – friend Nick will be doing design
upload pictures of people sitting on chairs
(Seth Godin– internet marketing god according to Erik)

Graham-
Worked on different variation techniques in chuck.
Registered elbowpatch.es for new music project.
Tony liked my CD!

Hackfest 110101 Postortem

Friday, December 8th, 2006

Thursday 7 Dec 2006 – alone with the soul

There were djs here playing soul music and the lights were down low.
Graham was here alone tonight, he worked on a new chapter of his cheesy chuck tutorial.
The new chapter examines variation techniques for livecoding.

Hackfest 110100 Postortem

Friday, December 1st, 2006

30 Nov 2006 – more livecoding evangelism

roster- Mark, Alex, his student Zach, Jason Ho, Puyan, cognitive scientist person
also met Chap (programmerer of PCI cards for small broadcast company) and Ed (web programmerer) and gave Tony a demo

Jason is working on a cool question/answer collaboration site. And wants to do a music collaboration site with inline editing.
Puyan is working on cross-domain authentication in J2EE.
Zach will work on computational algebra systems.

Hackfest 10000 Mortem

Friday, December 16th, 2005

Since last week:

Vinny:

  • Managed to get PyOgre to compile on the Mac.
    • One downside though: it doesn’t fully work with OpenSDL
  • PyOgre runs and a has started to tie into Commotion.
  • Scenes in Ogre can be created through PyOgre in Commotion.

Graham:

  • Finals… *sigh*

Luke:

  • Linux on kitchen sink.
    • Loaded up OpenWRT onto my Linksys WRT54G.
    • Loaded up Linux onto my Treo 650.
  • Did some MythTV work especially to fix my settings that allow me to have the MythTV box automagically shutdown when idle and startup when it needs to record.

Tonight:

Vinny:

  • Messed with commotion.
  • Downloaded a version of emacs thats not from the 70’s.
  • Spent some time on real-time document collaboration.
    • Real-time in this case means 2+ people are editing at the same time and all other editors see their changes in real time.
    • SubEthaEdit is an excellent example of this principle.
    • DocSynch markets itself as being exactly what Vinny wanted, but turned out that almost everything is still "planned".
    • Considering JEdit as a potential base to implement a cross-platform version.  Hopefully the protocol will be generic enough that others will implement it for other editors (emacs, eclipse, etc…).
    • BEEP for Java would be great for this if Vinny can find a open version that supports peer features.

Graham:

  • Played with Emacs syntax tables and got the syntax system to tell
    him what was punctuation.
  • Contimplating the next steps for his prototype.
  • Potential next step: rewrite the code to do character level timing so that its easy to manage timing across edits.  And, crack the problem of serializing the data across sessions.

Luke:

  • Did some reading of arm/linux documents and source code.
  • Thought about trust systems and personal data.  Can one create services in which the user doesn’t need to trust you?
  • Discussed rich instant messanger services.

I’ll linkify things later.

Hackfest 1111 Mortem

Thursday, December 8th, 2005

Since Last Week:

New cool posters from pushmepullyou and methanestudios.
Podcast goes here.

Vinny-
Running in circles.
Graham-
Doing homework and running in circles.
Ben-
Nothing, except a birthday.

Today’s Plans:

Vinny-
PyOgre should be running.
Graham-
Need to fix bug where text properties spread. Need them to be confined to periods.
Ben-
Figure out how to make JUnit classes that wrap regular classes.

Today’s Reality:

Vinny-
Installed newer version of Python (2.4) and scons (python make). Pyst is not working.
Graham-
Made clock properties non-sticky, which fixed the issues. Working on rendering the invisible clocks.
Ben-
Will autogenerate testclass. You manually wrote a test class so he can design the code generator.
Will need to fix grading threads, each in their own thread-group. So when a student starts a JFrame in their program, you can shut down the JFrame as well.