Atlhack

New Members: Mon, John, Josh

Mon
– @mon_ellis
– painter, photographer, filmmaker, artist, activist
– makes live action mixed with stop motion
– likes Jan Švankmajer
– likes Living Walls
– uses Stop Motion Pro -> Final Cut Pro to make stop-motion films

John
– digital media strategy, social justice
– futurist, artist
– building entrepreneurial strategies around emerging technologies
– “just being curious, man”
– Dyson sphere, self-replicating robots to dismantle planets
– John Smart’s transcendence hypothesis
– Fermi’s Paradox

Josh Watts
– n-grams, shingles, fractals, mongoDB
– energy density of hydrocarbons
– thorium nuclear reactors

Karthik
– searching flow field databases
– invariances? scale?

Mark
– talking with folks
– sketching in space and time

What’s the longest palindrome you can produce entirely out of words in
/usr/share/dict/words ? (or some other finite word list?)

- Spaces don’t count; the string, minus spaces and punctuation, has to
be a palindrome.
- Don’t use the same word more than once.
- Bonus points for constructing something syntactically valid-ish, but
that seems hard.

Something of a classic; I guess I was thinking about Peter Norvig.

Rob:
– prototyping an iPad game with Codea
– going to Austin this weekend
Mark:
– implementing Reaction-Diffusion Model with Interacting Turing Modes, (results: http://diatomaton.com/2012/multi-layer-reaction-diffusion/)

Erik
– adding Solr (full-text search) to network event monitoring code
– Rhobbler is hobbled by an incomplete JSON API (Graham, do you know anyone we can contact at Rhapsody?)
Mark
– minimum cost matching between instantiations of a shape grammar
– fixed Corkbird bitrot
– created a customized version of Corkbird for designing swimming creatures

(Mr. ENIAC is 65 years-old today.)

Rob:
– made FWOOM for the global game jam this weekend
– build in Unity, 2D ragdoll physics, written in C#
– Mark only was able to get past three-ish levels
Diana:
– making a business card, frustrated by font choices
– started doing the codeyear.com tutorials
Mark:
– optimizing some OpenGL code
– compiling FaceTracker code
– contacted by a Japanese developer who is using the ShadowDraw code from Mark/Abhijeet/Sebastien’s vision project

David:
– over the winter break
1) his car was stolen and returned
2) he went to a music festival in mexico
– tonight: reading about kobe beef, japanese economy
Mark:
– making different particle repulse themselves
– used bad coefficients to pow, fixed!
Rob:
– wrote a (considerate) comment on a blog about user-interface, Don Norman
– playing with casio loops in Abelton
– reading game development tricks

We also talked about the Guthman Music Instrument contest, in particular, using the Kinect as a drumstick (literally).

Chris M.
– optimizing his OpenCL optical flow code (TV-L1)
– multigrid, based on matlab reference implementation
– got an 1-2 extra frames-per-second!
– needs to study for job interview next week
David S.
– making a video about his computer vision class projects (“learning portfolio”)
– “seen the promised-land, been to the mountain-top”
Mark L.
– implementing edmonds-karp graphcut method (to study for final)
– writing in python, maybe halfway done
Karthik R.
– reading about water special effects in Cinefex magazine
– working on SIGGRAPH demo ideas (on paper)

Alex R:
- finishing up writeup for a project on Deniable Encryption
– crypto is really fun.
– http://code.google.com/p/narorumo/source/browse/trunk/deniable/
Lindsey K:
- helping her advisor write a grant proposal, for mad type-theory cash
– (they’re going to prove that certain classes of parallel languages run deterministically, with certain kinds of write-once datastructures)

Look to the Frozen North for cool side-project hacks as soon as we’re done with classes for good…

Talking about Kinect, avant garde projection mapping, semester is winding down.

Chris McClanahan
– showing us his viewercv app (on the android store)
David
– brainstorming microsoft kinect startup accelerator
Mark
– porting an old processing sketch to android
Rob
– preparing a paper submission to “Fundamentals of Digital Games”
Karthik
– banded cholesky can be done in linear time as long as the bands are equally spaced from the diagonal!

Vu Ha (New Member!)
– made of magic!
– graduated from CM program in spring
– worked on “Access” with Rob last spring
– Master’s student in CS now
– in Vision with David and Mark
– worked on SLAM with David

David
– applying for an artist residency at eyebeam in NYC
– - proposing DIY handheld RGBD camera project
– went to DC for Thanksgiving with the nuke fam
– the NYC for raucous weekend
Vu
– working on “BattleBoats” tonight
– refactored to use lockstep messaging between network clients
– went to Decatur for Thanksgiving (played Skyrim)
Rob
– GRE on Friday
– browsed Introversion Software’s source code from the Humble Bundle
– - sort of a mess, made him feel less ashamed of his own code
– went to Macon for Thanksgiving
Gregg (Van Laningham)
– writing script for a puppet show at Engauge on Wednesday (the 7th)
– preparing for thesis defense in early January
– - zirconium diboride ceramics with secondary phases for oxidization resistance
– after graduation: educational science materials / tutoring / puppetering
– puppet show this Friday at the Basement in Buckhead
– - “puckin’ fuppet show” – sort of an open mike night
Karthik
– reading about vorticial smoke simulation
– lots of linear algebra today
– - Cholesky decomposition / Schur complement!!
– going to Pittsburg / CMU on Thursday
– went to Midtown/Doraville for Thanksgiving
Mark
– went to Snellville/Alpharetta for Thanksgiving
– made a Processing sketch run on his Android phone
– making a ShadowDraw implementation that (almost) runs on the phone
– going to Pittsburg / CMU on Thursday