Atlhack

A founding member returns to Atlanta!

Vinny
– since last time: colorado, boston, now back in Atlanta doing independent consulting work (writing webservices in Closure)
– tonight: election stuff – lots of interactive infographics
– – you can zoom in and see the counties
– showing us Genera LISP running on a DEC alpha with X11 on a Mac
David
– working on his Flickr-maps project
– computing a weighted Voronoi diagram by rasterizing triangles
– – (debug-image-1, debug-image-2)
– going to use natural boundaries for the regions (water, highways, big parks and stuff)
– going to us “interestingness” for weighting regions
Chris McClanahan
– editing a BMX video with a gopro camera
– going to Supercomputing 2012 next week to represent AccelerEyes
– since his last Atlhack: graduated from program Master’s at GT
Karthik
– debugging shapes deformation/correspondence
– video game reverse engineering discussion with Mark
Mark
– discussing reverse engineering the physics of video games with Karthik

Also, coincidentally, sitting behind us was:
Chris Parnin, who was working on his dissertation (in software engineering with Spencer Rugaber).

David
– digital clay sculpting (spraying) interface
– – gyroscope data over osc to processing to control spray direction
– map of nyc from flickr photos
– – mean shift clustering
– – convex hull of clusters for image mask
Karthik
– debugging his non-rigid registration code
– – energy minimization with levenberg-marquardt in python/numpy
– – not sure if the Jacobian is correct, adding more damping
Mark
– interpreting freeform multi-touch gestures for a visual synthesizer
– – synced to music, converting into colors
– made a sketch for gradually subdividing a timeline, setting values hierarchically:

Everybody
– went to FLUX last Friday

David
– worked in Barcelona this summer
– applied for a job working on a TV show “attaching cameras to sharks and lions and stuff”
– turning fish into music (for a living)
– making visual maps of cities from pictures (master’s project)
– using python, scraped 1/2 million flickr photos

Erik
– switching to a service-oriented architecture at work
– using custom distributed messaging format/client/server
– memory efficient, simple
– used for analyzing network traffic

Karthik
– working on non-rigid registration of 3D surfaces
– doing symbolic differentiation in python

Mark
– worked in Grenoble this summer
– made multi-touch animation tools
– fixed problems with logins on Corkbird
– tiny javascript project adjproj (more explanation next week)

Discussion
– typestate, dynamic vs static typing
– python 2 vs 3
– “there’s a beneficial monoculture in the ruby community … as long as you’re developing on a mac and deploying to debian, you’re fine”

New Members: Mon, John, Josh

Mon
– @mon_ellis
– painter, photographer, filmmaker, artist, activist
– makes live action mixed with stop motion
– likes <a href="http://en similar al viagra.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_%C5%A0vankmajer”>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
– – videos of the results

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)