Archive for the ‘People’ Category

Hackfest 1001001 Postmortem

Sunday, May 20th, 2007

19 May 2007 – atlhack special edition

Since Last Meeting-
Grant- has been working on 4-D cities.
Vinny- hacking python scripts for user interface of navigation system.
Mark- hacked into nodebox and added some callbacks.
Alex- hacked Twidor to collect data for study.
Graham- wrote a new chuck piece.
Zack- finishing school in a week! going to GHP for math
Sonali- got a job with Sita! (and a laptop?)

Today’s progress-
Graham- added timing stats for queries. adding labels for axes.

other interesting people who showed up:
Alex Grey- computing psuedo potentials for particles.
Matt Gilbert- will be putting up videos of Sonic Generator soon!
Jessica Sherwood- planning the future of Atlanta new music!
Zach’s dad!
John Croft IV – database development guru

Hackfest 1001000 Postmortem

Wednesday, May 16th, 2007

16 May 2007 – short early meeting

Graham had to come early because of a show in East Atlanta with Rob.
(not sure who may have shown up later)

The Updates:
Mark- writing matlab code for cellular automata with Will.
 We discussed optimizing matlab code- perhaps the best gains can be had by preallocating arrays, and by eliminating loops- vectorizing them- by turning them into computations over vectors and matrices. There is a good collection of resources here.
Mark also made an animated visualization of the elementary CA zoo here:
http://notlime.com/2007/automata/one_dimensional.html
Besides that, he sent me lots of links on DBM datastructures like B-trees and R-trees.

Graham- got Mused to support zooming.

Post updates if you get a chance!

Hackfest 1000110 Mortem

Tuesday, May 1st, 2007

01 May 2007 – atlhack, your connection machine

met AJ, grading papers – grading papers for intro to MBA at UPhoenix. "Born to Party" t-shirts

Sonali means like Gold! Tejus means bright like the sun!
Graham’s name means "gravel area" or "grey homestead".
Mark means a dot on a plot or visualization. Will means great protector.

Since Last Week-
Will- job search stuff, met with Coke people. debugged BASIC for running beverage dispenser, with a Y2K bug, doesn’t deal with the midnight wrap. now it uses millisec since 1901.
-finished with reading Jason’s entrepreneuring books.
Mark- made bricks in nodebox. wants to make cornered bricks.
-doing visualization for high dimensional dataset.
-was chased by a Jeep and slammed his finger in a door.
-met Jay Jackson, a Qaboomer, starting brewpot.com
Tejus and Sonali- got highlights in their hair.
Graham- got dynamic queries working on the max pitch class profile.

Mark likes Mira Nair imdb wp documentaries and dramas, movies about Bombay street kids.

Graham
-loves Mark Guzdial’s blog on CS education- GOTO considered useful for learning.
John Maeda – artist at media lab – advisor to Processing. He used to write programs without loops.
Functional languages do not perhaps support the tracing-through metaphor of languages.

Tonight-
Will- is reading the Connection Machine, after having a parallel processing discussion with Mark.
Mark- working on building walls and brick houses.
Tejus- wants to learn how to use Rake (ruby build tool) more effectively.
Sonali- Mark will help Sonali prepare for an interview which requires three years of javascript.
Graham- finishing up his first draft of the paper.
Emily- is really busy and doing finals.

Hackfest 1000100 Postmortem

Wednesday, April 18th, 2007

17 April 2007 – beautiful night

new person – j5 jony5.com
 
Since Last Week-
Erik- needs some dsp on his sensors. changed name of project to knowent- knowledge from enterprises. doing some graphic design.
Graham- segmented a song and put it into a sqlite database with features.
 -first version of an interactive plotter for personal sample libraries.
 -found Zotero, a research library organizer built into firefox.
Mark- dogwood festival, dancing loca luna, dancing agnes scott, reading and sleeping outside.
Alex- worked on SWIMM! fixing dictionaries for lookups in java or python. Find words that start with a stem. dictionaries need frequency counts.
Miriam- "teaching to transgress" to Cobb co preschoolers.
Gregg- graduating soon! will work in materials lab over the summer.

This Week’s Plans-
Zach- hanging out!
Erik- adding PageRank tracking, search term ranking.
Graham- going to decode segments to disk so maybe they will play correctly. and they did!
Mark- make nodebox by calling objective C? gonna do some nodebox.
Alex- talking? working on new blogging extension?
Miriam- reading how to subvert tomorrow’s minds.
Gregg- needs to do his application for grad school.

Flash competitors – MS has Silverlight, Adobe has Apollo

Hackfest 1000010 Postmortem

Tuesday, March 27th, 2007

27 March 2007 – crazydar (on okcupid)

New person: Eric from MSCS Gatech
Has used Processing to access CV libraries.

Rory! – teaches drama writing at Gainesville State College.

Since Last Week-

Tejus- tried to work on Structural Fusion (work in IE) has router troubles, configuration of NAT.
Sonali- finding a new job, fulltime in software development.
Mark- wrote qaboom code for AJAX dropdowns. Drawing arrows in nodebox.
Read about superglue (chucklike language) and scala functional language (compatible with JVM) supports closures and union types, and pattern matching.  (not the musical tuning scala)
Superglue is a reactive programming language, like lucid (jet autopilot language)
Alex- designed a SWIMM experiment, writing the paper for mini-querty error correction.
Two revolutions- two class of typos being conflated into one.
Rapid keypresses in sequence, one must register first over a serial line.
class 1: insertion before, class 2: insertion after
will use difference between transition features, should help to disambiguating
has a new camera
Erik- fixing up his house. A tree fell on his cable line. saw Of Montreal in Athens.
They applied his patch to Rails- fixed a part of proxied associations.
Graham- they released a new chuck! with my Dynamics object. wrote a country song.
Puyan- musicPlot, the spatial music navigator is coming along nicely.
You plot your songs on a plane, then draw curves to make playlists.

This Week’s Plan-

Mark- Arrows, motion symbols, etc.
Alex- helping Zach debug his C++. Has code for typo stuff.
Erik- making another refinement of carpal. search engine optimization, shopping cart.
Graham- will do some chuck hacking for music.

Last Sonic Generator of the season was awesome. Matt Gilbert‘s (awesome IDT student) video for Vermont Counterpoint was amazing.

Hackfest 1000000 Postmortem

Wednesday, March 21st, 2007

13 March 2007 – new member Drew!

works at Gametap managing data services for saved games, scores, other important info.
does some cool python open source development.
wants to do more procedural graphics and sound. djs.

http://djfroofy.livejournal.com/
http://xix.python-hosting.com/

he recommends:
the GDC2007 lecture from Koji Kondo on interactive game scores
pyweek, compete to build a game in a week in python

Since Last Week-
Mark- worked on qaboom php code
Alex- handhelds have a discrete sampling period 16ms (typos)
submitted to a background check for work
Graham- built ChucKLib into Playmotion.
jammed with Mark and made a video.

This Week-
Emily- writing a paper on difference between Trent and Luther- good works vs. non-chosen salvation.
Mark- testing performance of python sequence functions, wanted to cheaply iterate over sketch points.
Alex- solve 2 keys at once
Graham- not much, documentation. need to do the MIR homework.

Hackfest 111110 Postmortem

Wednesday, March 21st, 2007

27 Feb 2007 – return from pycon

Gavin is the dude serving coffee and tea tonight.
atlhack.org was down because drupal was hosed.
(ps- was due to the missing user 0 bug:
http://drupal.org/node/34847http://devbee.com/all_important_user_zero)

Since Last Week-
Graham- got a UDP interface compiling in XPCOM.
-released chuck assignment for cs4950.
Mark- colo dudes say open-top server probably ok.
-has many stories from pycon, will transcribe.

new face-
Hamed Hashemi-
worked for Mark’s company, now works for Hakano, a Web2.0 consultancy startup.
they have a framework for quickly building web applications.
He also wrote RadioJavan.com, a website for Persian music.

Sonali- onto next project. working on the website (almost done).
starting a company with Tejus- building website with WordPress with company ideas.
A small contracting company with designers and programmers.
Structural Fusion- ruby on rails and free software- easy for small businesses to use.
Use case- T’s parents, have a small company of 3-4 people.
Websites should be easy to change and add products.
Documentation so non-CS users can administer- with AJAX tools and maintenance tools.

Tejus- worked a bit on ruby mp3 player.

Jason- qaboom LLC.
Met guys for partnership- license them the tech, have them market qaboom.
Went to visit them in Corona (Fender guitars).
Agreed to work for them verbally- was unsure about them- family expressed doubts.
Would not sign until he sees a lawyer.
Tony is trying to steal Jason’s code and domain.

advice from design of qaboom-
Record all information – ip views – can be used to debug, can be used creatively.

Will- not sure if he wants to work for Coke.

Plans for this Week-
Graham and Mark- try talking between chuck and python (nodebox) via OSC.
work on getting OSCkit compiled for XPCOM, then ported to mac.
Sonali- wordpress stuff.
Tejus- Design work and resume updating.

Tonight’s Reality-
Graham and Mark- got nodebox talking to chuck via OSC! synch music.
(have held jam sessions on Thursdays hereafter)

Hackfest 111101 Mortem

Tuesday, February 20th, 2007

20 Feb 2007 – tomato basil soup and laser techno

Since Last Meeting-
Alex- released a new version of JES with fewer bugs.
Graham- gave a lecture on Computer Music Languages.
Mark- went to Atlanta Ruby Users’ Group and met Sam. They made wikis in Rails. Mark prefers Python to Ruby. (yield in the middle of a template, too much magic)
Billings- got his AB2 amp sounding good at low volumes, without frying any power tubes.
Erik- minor releases of carpal, his blogging platform.

Devin- soon ID/CM graduate. hailpixel.com surfacing letter. sunflow radiosity cooker in java. going to grad school.

Colo- Mark will call them to see if they will accept an open-top server. Alex will go to Fry’s for a top. Next week Wed 9pm we’ll go to Alex’s and try to get it to recognize the fourth hard drive.

This Week’s Plans-
Mark- python needs to be standard to use nodebox (generative art app). Heading to pycon 2007 in Dallas, where topographica is simulating mammalian brains.
Erik- writing plugin engine for carpal– plugins are called fingers.
Graham- compiling non-XPCOM chuck plugin. finish Computer Audio assignment.
Billings- ultralinear output stage on the treble boost. change reverb driver so heaters isolated to bias them.
Alex- looking at GWT to do Runner’s problem. Starting from Hello World.

Raiding the 20th Century– an exposition on tape music, collage, and mashup.

This Week’s Results-
Graham- sketched out ChuckLib class.
Mark- got python working, importing packages for OSC and nodebox
Erik- grabbing fingers from the client partially implemented. path issues from relative to absolute.
Billings- tried to look up impedence of reverb tank, but wasn’t able to find model number
Alex- made Hello World app, loading into Eclipse, figured out package structure

Hackfest 111100 Postmortem

Monday, February 19th, 2007

13 February 2007 – 5 on 5

Tonight’s plans:

Tejus is making a web streaming mp3 program for Rails.
Sonali is learning Rails and updating an ecommerce site in Rails for her family, Choices Quilts.
Gregg Van Laningham will sketch a decorative stained-glass birdhouse with 4 removable sections for each of the four Seasons.
Mark is installing Django and postgres and svn. Will work on XPCOM UDP.
Alex is learning about Continuation Passing Style– a way to pass control around in functional languages. Also need to fix graphics bug on Mac version of JES, maybe in Mac Java 1.5. Graphics Context turns black when you use Graphics2D functions.
Graham is going to work on the embedded chuck, specifically calling it from a DLL.
Cali Mike is working on Real Analysis homework
– Six problems relating to the topology of the real line, open and closed sets etc.

books discussed:
Golden Notebook – five threads of dimensions of a personality – Mark mentions it.
Everything is Illuminated – Jonathan Safran Foer – contains three separate narratives that intertwine.

We discussed Scrum, Promises, and COMEFROM.

Peter Norvig facts

Tuesday, February 13th, 2007

Peter Norvig doesn’t sleep, he garbage collects.
Peter Norvig can compile from INTERCAL to MIPS assembly in his head.
Peter Norvig already knows whether P = NP or not.