Archive for the ‘News’ Category

First Fall Semester Hack 2010

Tuesday, September 7th, 2010

Rob
– Reviewed Machete evisceration

Mark
– Laplacian

provisional sunday afternoon meeting

Sunday, August 22nd, 2010

22 August 2010 – hacking in Octane, 2:20 Sunday afternoon

present are Mark and Graham
Matt, who is in the last year of ugrad, who makes experimental recordings, and who wants to move to Brazil, is our barista.
we met Brandon, who is involved in a lot of ATL startup culture, who is doing some integration with SalesForce, also he is an award winning area debate coach.

since last week:
Mark- came back from Disney in Burbank, CA, where he worked on technology intern and he should publish sometime soon.
He is readjusting to ATL humidity after being in the LA desert.
Graham- participated in classyHack, (see notes here), where I worked on formulating convex problems.

this meeting’s plans:
Mark- some kind of NPR edge thickness based on shading. Hopes to finish the rendering and make images.
Graham- will start with some odd tasks for administration, then install Matlab and try to hack in CVX into his superposition mosaicing.

to remember: Kunst Haus in Graz.

this meeting’s reality:
Graham- chatted, wrote email to boss, booked a flight for DAFx ’10 in Graz.
Mark- wrote some Processing Java for detecting and shading silhouettes, currently debugging.

 

updates: Puyan is here, we’re talking about his upcoming semester.
he brought some screwdrivers for replacing a hard drive in his machine…
he mentioned hudson for build managing?
random:
(possibly re-)discovered palindrome: meh, ahem
Rob looked for the blood on the first release of the Snow Leopard’s lips.
apparently there is a Freeside meeting on Tuesday.

challenge: Macro this picture and post it as a comment!

Graham: installing Matlab dependencies for my mosaicing code.
update: hooray! my code still works.

food related:
Vicky shared fried pickles with us (earlier).

We made a fruit salad from dragonfruit, lychee, and papaya.
We also made a stir fry with tofu, baby bok choy, and garlic shoots.
Bill and Rob are here from tasting Pauley’s chili at rush!

classyHack (Athens) trial meeting

Thursday, August 12th, 2010
Athens Hack Trial Meeting – 8pm 9 August 2010 – Trappeze
names: classicHack? classyHack?
present: Kelly, Graham, Marilyn
Kelly wants to join because he wants to congregate with other free-time programmers.
Marilyn is founding this chapter.
Graham is here to participate in the pre-first trial meeting.
Bo is here! He came to hang out with us!
since last week:
Graham: installed cvx and l1_ls on his Matlab installation.
Kelly: not much.
Marilyn: downloaded something on BitTorrent. worked problem 1 on Project Euler in Python (she is the first marilyn).
this week’s plans:
Marilyn: make a basic webform for posting to her website without ssh. and do another project Euler problem.
Kelly: no laptop tonight. If he had a laptop he would fix the fade in/out until all resources loaded.
Graham: compare and verify cvx and l1_ls with a simple numerical example.
this week’s reality:
Kelly: drew an awesome graphed out Rip-em off Dan.
Graham: wrote solvers.m that produces equal results for l1-regularized non-negative least squares problems, and adds a few linear terms using CVX.
Marilyn: almost done with script, got the HTML, just have to finish the CGI perl.

Athens Hack Trial Meeting – 8pm 9 August 2010 – Trappeze

Marilyn (mmm) is starting a group in Athens! She hasn’t started to invite people yet, we just scoped out a possible venue, a downtown pub called Trappeze. (if you are in Athens and want to join, leave a comment or drop us a line!)

names: classicHack? classyHack? ASS? (Athens Segfault Society, contributed by Bo)

present: Kelly, Graham, Marilyn

Kelly (his site) wants to join because he wants to congregate with other free-time programmers.
Marilyn is founding this chapter.
Graham is here to participate in the pre-first trial meeting.
Bo is here! He came to hang out with us!

since last week:

Graham: installed cvx and l1_ls on his Matlab installation.
Kelly: not much.
Marilyn: downloaded something on BitTorrent. worked problem 1 on Project Euler in Python (she is the first marilyn).

this week’s plans:

Marilyn: make a basic webform for posting to her website without ssh. and do another project Euler problem.
Kelly: no laptop tonight. If he had a laptop he would fix the fade in/out until all resources loaded.
Graham: compare and verify cvx and l1_ls with a simple numerical example.

this week’s reality:

Graham: wrote solvers.m that produces equal results for l1-regularized non-negative least squares problems, and adds a few linear terms using CVX.
Marilyn: almost done with script, got the HTML, just have to finish the CGI perl.
Kelly: drew an awesome graphed out Rip-em off Dan.

addendum:
southern_drawl(I have always depended upon the flexibility of data abstraction.”);

Early Spring Bloominghack!

Tuesday, March 23rd, 2010

– Alex is porting the rhyme-scoring code from the poetrybot to Python
– but right now, it only does end rhymes, which isn’t particularly interesting. (but it’d be pretty easy to expand to internal rhymes…)
– in research news, he plugged toulbar2 into the dependency parser (which uses constraint solving to do a parse — and now pretty soon will do “soft constraints”, or just “preferences”) — and is now thinking about how to find out what the weights on the constraints should be, with machine learning.

– Lindsey read about information flow security in a PL context (so, like: languages that support security levels in the type system. eg: jif)
– also: went running
– research news: working on translating a language with dependent types to continuation-passing style. Also, thinking about how to formally describe (like, with automated theorem-proving) the interactions between static and dynamic languages.

Focused Hack

Tuesday, March 2nd, 2010

It has snowed on three separate occasions in Atlanta this winter, and today was one of those days.

Rob is making a Game Boy (Advance) game, Asteroid Doom. He’s writing C code, using GBA mode 3.

Mark is learning Scala because he (amusingly) signed up to talk at the Atlanta Scala Meetup without knowing the language. He’s using it to make visual stuff in Processing.

We are both quite focused, as Rob’s game is for class and due by midnight, and Mark needs to learn Scala in the next 45 hours or risk losing face.

This weekend we attended the Guthman Musical Instrument Competition, listened to weird new instruments, watched talks by Gil, Jason, and Parag, chatted with Andrew Beck, Alex Rae, Nishant Mehta, and Karthik Raveendran. The highlights for me were the live-soldering performance and yjr suitcase full of solenoids. The magnetic resonator piano performance was also excellent, and we agreed, is the most likely to see wide-spread adoption.

More hacking in Bloomington

Wednesday, February 3rd, 2010

– Alex has restarted his efforts to programmatically generate bad poetry.
— fixed the bit-rot in his old Lisp/inference-engine version
— started porting code for rhymes into Python
— NLTK is going to make this a whole lot easier.
— (((UP EVERYBODY) (ACROSS ALL DELIRIUM) (COME SAVE MAN WHILE OUT)))
— This wants to be running on App Engine, so people can vote snippets of text as POETIC OR NOT.

– Lindsey went to rehearsal for the choral piece she’s going to perform, answered a bunch of questions from her students, and is reading some papers about Foundational Proof-Carrying Code. And is still waiting to hear back from Jane Street.

Some of the grad students around Bloomington have started a weekly “study party” on Sunday afternoons at the local coffee shop — we need to hijack this and get them to work on cool side projects.

Also, our friend Will Byrd is getting a local hardware-hacking group together… he’s got Arduinos (etc) and is building animatronic kitties.

Orange Waffles

Tuesday, November 17th, 2009

It has been a few weeks since we’ve posted.

We had a little server down-time when upgrading to Karmic Koala. But we’re back. Last week Mark and Tejus talked about genetic algorithms, because Tejus’s new company does some of that and Mark has been pondering a project that involves them.

And this week:

Rob
– Learning how to write an Atari program
– Going to make a variant of pong based on jai-alai with a swinging motion of the joystick
– Wrote a program in the Chef language for making orange-flavored waffles, which prints out the monetary fine for pirating a song, hopefully he’ll post this somewhere, it’s awesome!

Mark
– Intended to write some geometric code, can’t concentrate
– Read about Atlanta Startup Weekend 3 instead

Hackfest

Wednesday, October 14th, 2009

Richard is working on two songs for the Mediashare Benefit tomorrow at Smith’s Olde Bar

Emily is working on a sermon, by way of Facebook 😉

Rob shows us his Processing project that includes video of Glenn Beck + Katie Couric, plus flickr images of “obama + racist”. Is going to Under the Couch to watch Stuart perform

Eldon is turning his phone into a SIP gateway via Bluetooth, having issues with RFCOMM socket

Alsie is reading “The Green Collar Economy” and looking at “Wild Things” forts on booooooom.com

Mark is wrangling Java security for his Processing server (named “Projecting”)

First Day of Autumn 2009

Wednesday, September 30th, 2009

Rob:
Intended to work on Processing, instead wrote Japanese, including mysterious essay ending, talked with Mark about the technology of cinema. Wearing a threadless hoodie.
Mark:
Browsed papers from “Artifical Life” journal, hacked on his Processing server project, talked with Dustin about traditional animation tweening notation. Wearing a holey sweater.

Hacking in Bloomington

Tuesday, September 29th, 2009

Lindsey is writing some OCaml, evaluating lambda calculus expressions. “Also known as programs!”, she adds.

Alex is learning numpy and using it to model some Markov processes. It’s for an NLP class, but the use of numpy is totally gratuitous. He keeps meaning to autogenerate some bad poetry.

Happy hacking, ATL and Bay Area hackers!