Atlhack » Plans

Hackfest 1101110

Mark Luffel — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

Martin:
– hacked on D and GTK-D
– making a texteditor (textmate+vim clone)
Erik:
– entering exploratory phase of magic web framework
– tentatively titled “stellar”
– derived attributes, caching, everything in the model
– a big “F.U.” to M.V.C.
Mark:
– wrote a stack-based language: “yonth”
– adding more primitive operations tonight: greater_than, not_equals
– reading about Joy language, quoting
Alex:
– scrambled for launch
– successful except for minor communications snafu
– so it became an internal launch
– reading sicp, and mythical man month
Lindsey:
– received shiny new macbookpro at work
– received shiny emails from future professors
– ate quinoa
Anna Marie:
– wetting her pinky toe in web design
– working on a portfolio site for a friend
– figured out text-align: justify in Dreamweaver
– (still her means of coding)
Drew:
– released documentation for Miru: http://miru.enterthefoo.com/

Hackfest 1100101

alexr — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

Since last week…
Erik: "Nothing! On purpose!" … Erik is largely On Vacation.
Alex: Been working on the documentation browser thing for code-google-com, which is no longer secret! He’ll make everybody take a look at it when it launches, which is Soon. Also been working on the scrabble bot. And he got some cool anagram code from ZachG. Also, paper based on his masters work got into CHI.
Humza: Reading the new Lawrence Lessig book.

Tonight…
Alex: Looking for good information about event loops and callbacks in JavaScript, particularly on IE, where there’s occasional reentrancy weirdness.
Erik: Relaxing.
Humza: www.freerice.com, talking about Arabic linguistics — and culture and language in general, Sapir-Whorf.
Wadner: (the r is silent) … spoke with Humza about culture and identity, online and off.

(where is everybody?)

Hackfest 1011000 Quite-Post Mortem

Mark Luffel — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

Since Last Time
    Graham
        visa issues
        looked over notes for the lab he’s going to teach at pampel fabra
    Alex
        scrabblebot progress
        sqlite working, really fast
        at work: stopped mocking up, started making the real thing
    Drew
        twisted wars, a serious hack
        "i’d write it the same way next time"
        tcp ray leak
    Cary
        worked his ass off
    Mark
        lazy rasterization,
        starbursts in processing,
        used as window closing animation in wildfire
    Devin
        working on fuzzwich,
        rolling out a new site soon,
        bug-fixing, profiling

Tonight
    Graham
        refactor mused,
        add features,
        document how to add a new feature
    Alex
        scrabble board datastructure,
        clever word placement
    Drew
        formencode in pylons, oilrig
        maybe some reading,
        communicating sequential processes (c.a.r hoare)
    Mark
        playing with shapes in nodebox

Hackfest 1010010 Mortem

graham — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

7 August 2007 – big group

Since Last Week-
Mark- got IOBluetooth package to load in GHCi, trying to get hsc3 to work
Bill- broke his amp, driver circuit failed after new tubes, may require redesign
got a Magnatone amp, it has a frequency modulation (vibrato) circuit
it also has a HUM1 and HUM2 – reversing between ground and liveline – a death switch
Rob- took a trip to Seattle. recorded a song cycle from the Northwest corner.
have been working on video editing, working on rap tracks.
Stuart- recorded two songs with Rob, first successful measurement
immersed in water with a certain concentration of chemical, sensors reported a gradient
in liquids its much harder because the polymers are shifted around by the solution
Alex- went to Google, came back, have been digging in docs about unit testing and security
wants to be invulnerable to cross-site scripting
Miriam- moved to Athens, it almost looked like a house, but there might be CO
going to join Theory reading group – Dialogic Imagination by Bakhtin – the novel is often changing
Graham- gave a performance at Parkgrounds, wrote a song with Amanda

This Week’s Plans-
Rob- document the meeting with his camera, review recordings
Mark- trying to get IOBluetooth to work correctly in Haskell
Bill- reading Stumbling into Happiness, Daniel Gilbert
Stuart- hanging out and discussing music
Alex- going to be stylin’ his GWT app with a Hello World
Miriam- reading Bakhtin
Graham- going to work on ChucK music timing, prepare for performance tomorrow

Hackfest 1001111 Postmortem

Mark Luffel — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

since last time
Alex
- has two reference frames in his head
- Tech’s east campus is up, Decatur is very up
- as he zooms out, Peachtree starts to go up
- put references to Real-Ultimate-Power into the Wikipedia article about the spirit of jujitsu

Greg
- is going to move into a place off of Howell Mill
- is going to install ceiling fans there
- read about a company that was trying to draw maps in the way that humans draw maps for other humans
- now has keys to three buildings on Tech campus
- high-preformance ceramics: ceramics are non-metallic, non-polymeric, non-composite material
- aluminum is a ceramic because its atoms are covalently bonded with oxygen
- went to a computer camp at Oglethorpe in the era when Mike Tyson bit that guy’s ear off

Miriam
- is back from New York
- is about to move to Athen
- ran the newspaper at Oglethorpe for two years
- is registering for classes

Mark
- has started moving his Processing projects into IntelliJ
- finished the Parsec parser
- made his first typeclass (to unify the AST nodes of the statemachine problem)

Stuart
- worked
- jammed out with Rob on Sunday ("Mr Spanky Surprise")
- jammed out with Graham ("Johny J’s Got A New Pair A’ Shoes")
- both "too out-there" to incorporate into the Shithouse Kids style

tonight
Stuart and Greg are discussing materials
Miriam is helping Alex edit the Wikipedia article on Hinche
Mark is reading about the IO Monad in Haskell, and writing code for
"Can we share a linguistics Master’s?" -Alex to Miriam

Hackfest 1001011 Mortem

graham — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

19 June 2007 – Haskellnacht

new people:
Matt – Alex’s friend enrolling in MS mechanical engineering.
Asok – dude from the information retrieval company.

Since Last Week-
Mark- performed at electro-music 2007! learned chuck, wrote chuck bluegrass
-writing code to fold fabric in processing
-ran with Graham to Decatur
Greg- measured the volume of powder with helium gas
Alex- built first interactive demo of spelling correction on java + twidor
-exported classifier from WEKA, hooked it all up.
-hard part was python file wrapping up feature data and feed to classifier
-camp! teaching kids the python.
Will- to be hired by a contracting company working for a beverage company
-programmed a genetic algorithm in MATLAB, optimized a 1d cellular automata
-optimized it by feedback, how long a human would watch it
-reading Kurzweil’s The Singularity is Near
Graham- added live performance sampling stuff to Mused

This week-
Mark- learning Haskell
Alex- learning Haskell
Graham- learning Haskell
Will- reading Kurzweil

we were using GHC and The Gentle Introduction to Haskell

Hackfest 1001010 Postmortem

graham — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

29 May 2007 – everybody was sad in middle school

Mark is listening to Amadou et Miriam – the blind couple from Mali
mesons – groups of two quarks, baryons – groups of three
flavors – up, down, top, bottom, strange, charm

Since Last Time-
Erik- company didn’t go public. will implement memcache. amazon ec2 – virtual hosting API.
Alex- getting ready for summer camp.
-learned Scratch- it’s obvious, least astonishment, can make complex animations.
-doesn’t give you structured procedures as in logo.
Graham- added ChucK export to Mused.
Jason- qaboom may be bought by inquus.
Will- knees undergoing cellular reconstruction. helped build a pergola.
-read The Long Tail, would recommend it for a quick read.
-Why Google is important, Amazon vs B&N, etc.
Mark- made triangle grids with the wrong irrational numbers.

Tonight-
Will- going to write Excel sheet for aiding irrigation system design. reading Brief History of Time.
Erik- finishing his coffee and going home.
Graham- will add a configurable range filter for loudness. ask UI advice.
Jason- is giving a demo tomorrow, will work on his codebase.
Mark- will fix his triangle grids of different sizes.
Alex- package up last release of JES. bug free trademark.

Hackfest 1000111 Mortem

graham — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

8 May 2007 – well-oiled servers

New member: Joe!
he is a cofounder of We The Citizens.
Niche Technology with Paul Royal- online convention registration software.
(Mitch Halpin, Gallagher Prior, tech CS peeps)

Since Last Week:
Mark- hung out at some awesome parties. Tina’s chicken party, Puyan’s graduation party.
Alex- started work on a journal article for mini-querty!
Will- in charge of designing fluid pumping system.
Graham- submitted first computer music paper on Mused!

Tonight:
Mark- japanese notecards for adjectives.
Alex- working on an improved google widget todo list!
Will- is reading A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.
Joe- perhaps will drink a few beers.
Graham- gonna try the new audicle, make a screencast. learning LiSa!

Martin’s poetry-bot sent us a poem: "gunwales"

all those times

i’m suddenly in motion through
the back carefully, drain,
add cream and worn gunwales, the wrong windows

you will come closer. this is
your story; you have learned these words
than you the pocked road
to yourself out to her.
some form of backed-up drains, too

Hackfest 111000 Mortem

graham — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

18 Jan 2007 – octane x mstreet

Tonight, Alex and I met at Octane. DJs were funky, not too loud, louder.
Mark called us up to his place at MStreet, college people and Jason were there.

What we worked on:
Alex- Proposed a problem as a potential GMaps hack (more below).
Graham- Adding VM status functionality to ChucK firefox plugin (XPCOM).
Mark- Porting OpenSoundControl to Mozilla via XPCOM.
Jason- Adding new features to his Q&A site startup, Qaboom. (smileys in chat, etc)

gmaps-
Alan Turing, Charles Babbage, Ada Lovelace, and n-3 other computer scientists are in a running club. They need an application to determine the most fair meeting point (similar to the centroid for street distance), so that they all run an equitable amount to reach the meeting place. Alan is a stronger runner than Charles, so we can expect him to be able to run farther by some scalar, like 2. Our algorithm should take this into account.

xpcom-
Both Mark and Graham were having binary build problems with XPCOM. First, we both had an issue with xpcom_Glue. G solved it only linking xpcomglue_s.lib (instead of that and xpcomglue.lib) into his binary. M solved it by building his project with more recent Makefile as a starting point. Sometimes one wishes the C++ compiler could be a little less literal.

XPCOM is in general a neat toolkit for making cross-platform software, it is not without its pitfalls. Several great resources are informative but contain out of date elements (book, component tutorial) with nods to the changes only in web accessible mailing lists. Since this is open source, some of the burden falls on us to update the materials. (Maybe M and I can do that after we finish our components.)

An application or applet has many components end-to-end, in different languages and systems. Possibly you will have binaries in C++ XPCOM, scripts in javascript, chrome configuration in RDF, and UI specification in XUL. Starting a project and debugging is therefore an extra-long chain of getting little things wrong until you start getting them right, and tutorials are long and laborious. On the other hand, splitting the effort between subsystems seems more flexible. It would feel wrong to put the config or UI stuff in procedural code, or the scripting stuff in binary. Startup time vs. flexibility, probably a reasonable tradeoff.

Atlanta Startup Links

ynniv — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

I’m currently busy in Colorado, but I haven’t forgotten about the ATL. I just found some new Atlanta startup oriented resources:

This brings up something which has been eating at my brain for a while now… why is Georgia Tech not more involved in startups? Is it a lack of faith in their people? Are they not aware of the possibilities? Have there been a lot of failures in the past? Maybe its the lack of substantial venture capital in the southeast. Even from Colorado, I can see that Atlanta is more up-and-coming than most people realize… its time for Tech to get involved.