Atlhack

At Octane they were playing Animal Collective, all of the old baristas (Gavin / Josh / Ben) are either working different nights or have new jobs now.
Rob suggested the name “LIAM” for this hack, as an anagram of (AI + ML). He also said something about Oasis, but not because there were any British pop-rock stars in attendance.

Fokes
– talked about medical school applications
– skin regeneration, hyperbaric oxygen chamber
– pluripotent stem cells
– veblen / giffen goods
Mark
– intersecting cylinders and triangle meshes
— for a surgery planning project
— explained the math to Fokes
Rob
– doing an objective-c tutorial
— making command line programs
– eating a king of pops that tastes like pumpkin pie
Erik
– worked on a new rhobbler
— because Rhapsody removed RSS feeds, so he’s scraping html now
— doing test-driven development, opened the site in a browser for the first time
— all the paths worked!
– living in midtown now, first atlhack in two-ish years
– taking the AI class, and ML class
— sebastian thrun’s writing is hard to understand

Octane is full tonight, we had to battle for a table.

New member: David Stolarsky
– grad student at GT, studying computer vision
– he and Mark worked on a project together
– went to Art&Code at CMU last weekend

Tonight:

Emily:
– has a new job at Ecoscorecard
— located in Inman Park
— doing Ruby web dev
– playing Glitch
— made by the original Flickr folks
— has beautiful illustrations, and an API!
John:
– working on testify
– “like Rack/WSGI for testing frameworks”
– for making all your continuous-integration/failure-notification/etc tools work with whatever wacky Ruby testing framework you’re using
Diana:
– has an internship at the Georgia Department of Economic Development
— making photos, editing photos
– bought a CF card reader to replace a lost one
– photoshopping shots of Fernbank Museum
Mark:
– preparing slides for a lecture
— for computer graphics class on Thursday (he’s the TA)
David:
– creating a poster of silhouette cutouts
— from the shadowgram project
— wrangling imagemagick
Rob:
– working on a (cooking) game that may use a two-handed input device to help elderly people retain their executive decision making skills
– showing off “My Horse”
— it’s like Tamagotchi + Farmville
– exploring procedural generated textures in Unity 3D

Also, I cleaned out the “subscribers” from the WordPress database just now, because it was mostly spam. If you’re an Atlhacker without an author account, let me (Mark) know and I’ll create an account for you.

At Octane they’re playing hip-hop mashups with Sufjan Stevens backing tracks.

Matt Peters[e/o]n (new member)
– graduated from GT in May
– had a class with Rob
– likes biking and coding, writing video games
– explaining vertex separation of axis theorem for collision detection to Rob and Mark
Rob
– flixel, 2d collision detection
– going to perform two songs on Saturday
– going to start building games at his job tomorrow
Diana
– updating her website
– ate a zucchini muffin
– is busy this week, wants to clone herself
Mark
– compiling llvm on the atlhack server, then he can compile rust maybe?
– writing baby rust code, for triangle meshes
– [update] compiled a rust program!

People:
Joe, Rob, Enrique, Fokes, Mark

Topics:
BitCoin, Anarchism, Property, Holodecks, Replicators, WIPO, Lady Gaga + Zynga, Area/Code, Enrique’s Hair, FourSquare MMORPG, Ownership of Coffee + Donuts, Obscure Standup, Van Eck Phreaking, Videogum review of Thor, Intense OkCupid Introductory Messages (see post title)

Hacks:
Rooting Nooks, Secure SMTP on Joe’s Server, Logarithms of Affine Matrices, pow(1-pow(x,2),3), Anvil Video Annotation

alexr:
- Made contact with the BloomingLabs folks, probably going to go hang out with them tomorrow and see what’s up.
- developing a lab assignment for his students: n-gram autopoetry… been having a good conversation with Edde Addad, mysterious Internet Electronic Poetry Person, about this.

Diana
– Photoshopping the GLG Grand out of a photo of the Atlanta skyline
– before/almost-after
– Mark’s dad built (i.e. was a carpenter on) this building in the early ’90s, but he’ll forgive the affront

Mark
– modified his Floyd-Steinberg dithering code to handle color images
– 8-color photo from New Year’s Day
– updating qualifier talk slides in preparation for Thursday
– on Sunday, biked with his dad from downtown, up Edgewood to the Krog tunnel
– recorded on a video camera with a rolling shutter, neat image distortions

Bruce
– n-body simulation, c++, stl vectors
– b-trees, parallel barnes-hut
– “there are a trillion trillion stars in the universe”
Joe
– writing JavaScript for randonized website layout
– not digging JS inheritance
– showing off There’s No Time to Explain
Mark
– trying to figure out the new Blender python API
Rob
– is now a game designer:
– in class, converted a video game into a hop-scotch game
– players held hands, had to jump to a greater number at each step
– classmates playtested it: CLASSMATES HELD HANDS!
– Rob wins

Bruce
– has been here for hours
– wrote a paper for Online Communities class
– had a job interview today, graduating in May
Joe
– upgraded his Debian system today and overcame hassles with grub failing to reinstall the bootloader
– made a transparent png in Photoshop
– showed off secret mosaic project
Fokes
– played angry birds, death worm, words with friends (on his iPad 1)
– avoided studying for optics test
– coveted Bill’s iPad 2
Mark
– had a paper accepted to SIGGRAPH
– writing some code for multi-objective optimization
Bill
– worked on chapter for upcoming Android book
– made some cool iOS music apps at work
Rob
– gathered feedback on “Access”, his artgame where you play as a wheelchair dude
– has been working on an augmented reality presentation tool for use with the Kinect
Eldon
– is here with his ladypartner
– has a new job at an ATDC spinoff company
Melissa
– is selling her house
– playtested Rob’s game
– played QWOP, laughed hysterically

Meeting without Kelly tonight — and hoping he gets over the evil flu soon.

Attendees: Marilyn, Michael, Virendra.

Talked about another venue for next week (George’s Low Country, Walker’s, Hendershot’s?) to avoid downtown hustle/bustle. Michael and Virendra are currently talking about three-dimensional database results and other cubic PhD topics. Marilyn’s “almost” done with some long-winded perl scripting for blogging: http://mmmarilyn.net/post/ Marilyn recommended the HackNY summer program to Michael — he applied and Marilyn also wrote a quick rec for him to one of the organizers.

Mark was at Octane to hack for the first time in many weeks.
Tejus arrived later and they chatted about Vertical Acuity, Pardot, SITA, Georgia Tech, etc.

Mark wrote some python, installed nltk, pyPdf, xpdf, plasTeX, and probably some other software too. He’s building something that makes visual art out of abstract math.

Things learned:
1) Many PDFs don’t contain word breaks, they just position the letters in the right spot on the page, gasp!
2) Installing pdftotext via MacPorts installs all sorts of stuff: OpenMotif, libxml2, xorg-libXdmcp, etc, etc, etc.
3) pdftolatex is pretty sweet
4) Apple’s Automator can convert PDFs into text, and by default outputs UTF-16, which scares tools like diff into thinking it is binary
5) arXiv.org hosts the LaTeX for papers, which maintains lots of extra contextual information, which is awesome
6) The world sure is full of things