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Hackfest 11100 Mortem

Thursday, March 30th, 2006

30th March 2006 – "Hola, atlhaqueros!"

Since Last Week:

Josh (n00b)
-author of previously featured JoshPOV blog
-avid wayfaring user: Josh’s Maps of Atlanta and elsewhere
-working on Tech Campus Map GMaps overhaul
-works with Graham at GTRI

Stephen
-school projects in progress:
1. Wikipedia Article on Data Integration (for Databases)
2. Graph-based Matrix Reordering to minimize fill-in on Gaussian Elimination (Sparse Matrices)
3. An improved Kalman Filter using Incomplete Matrix Factorizations (Machine Learning)

Martin
-hacking the GPU to compute silhouettes (for cell shading)
-designing the class interface for ChucK binary IO

Vinny
-looked into eclipse plugin API, looks hairy (SWT is Not Swing)
-custom graphics programming for commotion
-touched up original concept idea for Sonic Boom ChucK

Alex
-made the Never button work in SWIMM
-played Tekken5, visited Tim

Erik
-improved subwindow.com
-with AJAX history framework (works with Safari)

Luke
-reviewed his old SWT hack so he can reapply it
-got WXGA resolution MythTV working

Graham
-submitted ChucK instanceof patch
-needs to prepare for upcoming dorkbot talk
–dorkbot-atl presentation next Thursday at 7pm!

Tonight’s Reality:

Luke+Vinny
-started working on a Rhino console, dumps output

Graham
-setup MikTeX and tex2html on RENODAKOTA (laptop)
-started to write supplemental material for presentation
-started to write his first literate programs program

Erik
-familiarizing himself with javascript prototyping

Alex
-worked on packaging SWIMM
-packaging Java in OSX may be difficult, he shall overcome

Posted in People, Project | No Comments »

Hackfest 11011 Mortem

Thursday, March 23rd, 2006

23 March 2006 – Yuppie Ghetto (Midtown) Superstars

Since Last Week:

Vinny
-(Google Maps) KML export in Blender
-Better mock up of his target UI for Commotion
-ordered atlhack.org stickers! request yours soon!

Graham
-has a working proof-of-concept => instanceof operator. Needs to fix a few bugs.
-wants to come up with a => music tutorial.
-recorded some songs with => last weekend.

Luke
-worked on his MythTV box (svn-20+)
-helping create debian packages for deployment.
-wrote a PHP program that checks out svn source and deploys on website.

This Week Reality:

Vinny
-dabbled in adding Guile hooks to =>
-integrating Rhino and js hooks into Eclipse, true runtime language in Eclipse (w/ Luke)

Luke
-planned Crawfish boil (w/ Graham)
-Rhino+Eclipse (see above)

Graham
-debugged his patch for instanceof
-used ‘diff -ur’ to make a patch of this
-will use the patch to build a wrapper for STK instruments
-wrote outline for => music web tutorial

Posted in Plans, Project | No Comments »

Hackfest 11010 Mortem

Thursday, March 16th, 2006

Hackfest 11010 – 8 PMish, 16 March 2006 – A Code Knitting Circle

Since last week-

links: eigenradio, a singular christmas

Eric
–www.subwindow.com
-GSU student, also works full-time
-worked on Breakout Pro, messageboard features
-working on a web based IDE for php "wide".

Andrew
–yellowderby.hackmode.org
-graduated from Tech in Aerospace, works with student publications
-writing a free ESL dictionary, will finish before he reaches 39
-ESL is unique (different from EFL) because it is for speakers in an English-speaking country and must incorporate lots of cultural context

Alex
–sudoku solver in python
-went looking for Common Lisp GUIs, found LTK

Luke
-posted patch for Linux kernel for his keyboard

Vinny
-hacking commotion GUI, saved window state and added text labels
-visited UIUC in Champagne-Urbana
-used Shark (for profiling) and Quartz Debug (shows UI framerate and updates)

Graham
-gave a talk to Jason Freeman’s computer music class
-will give a better presentation to April 6 dorkbot-atl
-started attempting to add ‘instanceof’ operator to ChucK
-hasn’t looking into colocating
-hasn’t sent queries to huge emacs list yet

This week:

Graham
-SWIMM – spinning off modified "extract" binary
-making signal features that update at non-import times

Erik
-working on "wide", his web-based IDE

Alex
-ripping out inference engine from poetry bot
-wants it to learn more on its own

Luke
-messing with Guile, plans to use for his revisionist filesystem
-investigate creating services with SMS for timekeeping application
-can’t find a way to run a system process in Guile

Vinny
-will get the stickers in the right format

Andrew
-developing his process for the dictionary which would include:
   -scanning in books via OCR
   -need to find tools for tagging and annotating the words

Today’s realities:

Andrew
-working on grad school apps

Alex
-brainfried, reading Hume

Erik
-added ability to save files

Graham
-one-off modification of marsyas "extract" binary via #ifndef
-refactored some of the extraction code

Luke
-figured out how to communicate with process in Guile
-posix-like: you must use fork and exec
-going to write some wrapper code for it

Vinny
-got the pdf for the stickers, will send them out soon

Posted in People, Project | No Comments »

Hackfest 11001 Postmortem

Friday, March 10th, 2006

9 March 2006, 9ish at Octane

Before the meeting, Graham attended dorkbot-atl-3, Luke caught a flight from Louisiana, and Joel taught a climbing class. Vinny was taking a breather to prepare for a weekend trip.

News and updates:

Luke
 – worked on revamping his wiki and blog.
 – is looking for a good place to buy crawfish in Atlanta.
Joel
 – getting to know his Microkorg synth better. Wants to get max/msp.
Graham
 – will present some ChucK music at Jason’s computer music class.
 – is frequently offended by art theory.
 – wants to write program 100 for LiteratePrograms, will settle for 114.

This was a low key night of discussion and philosophy.

Posted in Computer Music, Plans, Project | No Comments »

startup school notes

Saturday, March 4th, 2006

I never actually typed up my notes from Startup School, but you can see notes and get audio on the presentations here: Startup School Presentations
Olin Shivers talk was especially excellent.
There is also a Startup Wiki for interested tech entreprenuers.

Posted in Plans, Project | No Comments »

Hackfest 10101 Mortem

Thursday, February 9th, 2006

9 Feb 2006: Kicking Ass and Taking Notes

Earlier today Graham attended the GVU Brownbag welcoming the newly minted, formerly GSU – Gatech BrainLab. They work with developing invasive and noninvasive brain interfaces for control of typing, surfing the web, etc.

Joel came! He quit his job touching up photos and maps.
He has 2 big projects and one small one.
1. Narration of an epic story through illustration.
2. Digital audio instrument: keyboard + trackpad with deformable grid
that allows you to navigate through harmony and scale space.
e. Tattoo artistry for his friends.
3. Children’s book as studies for number 1.

Graham and Joel went to dorkbot-atl to see Kevin and Steve talk.
The presentations were on video sculpture and gamelan-western hybrid music.

Vinny and Grant discussed Web 2.0 business models.
References: Gallery Nucleus, Kaneda, Video.Google, Homestar Runner, Achewood.
Zero cost distribution for creative works (other than the work creating them).
Grant wants to develop more of his creative side-projects.

Luke got published on Digg and Engadget. He hacked his phone to run Linux + apps.
This week he is learning a little about eclipse, eclipse plugins, rhino, and the linux usbnet module.
Currently in Baton Rouge on assignment.

Luke and I will be having a crawdad boil in the future. You will be invited.

Ben has started work for Bill. He’s working on a secret feature for Messenger.
"The weather is lovely because the jet stream just shifted
But it will be gone in a week and then back to the doldrums."

Music: an eclectic mix of alt-country, including Bright Eyes, courtesy of Octane.

Posted in Computer Graphics, Computer Music, Plans, Project | 3 Comments »

Punctuating Clocks

Monday, November 14th, 2005

In Laurie Anderson’s performance piece The End of the Moon she suggests that instead of ending sentences with periods, we might end them with clocks, signaling how long was spent on each.

I thought, "Emacs!", with the idea of making a gimmicky blog toy. Luke convinced me we might work to make it more generic, so it could be used as a program analysis tool as well.

The first version is rough, inserts directly into the text, and doesn’t account for edits.

Future versions will have the following characteristics:
1. Instead of using keystrokes, will take advantage of emacs’ structure of generic coding-text systems. It already knows where the statements begin and end.
2. Represent the time-stamps in some hidden form in the text, perhaps like glyphs or text properties. This would imply a separate render command. Luke points out that we’ll need accompanying files with these annotations for the source code case.
3. Come up with more clever renderings.
4. Can turn the system off.

The first draft is at ravelite.org/code/clocks/.

Posted in Brain Candy, Computer Graphics, Project, Toy | No Comments »

Hackfest 1010 Mortem

Thursday, October 27th, 2005

Since Last Week:

Ben-
    Added interactive invoke main method. Ran up with issues, but it’s usable.
    Still has issues with Settings in JavaBeans. TAs will start using his autograder in mere days.
Graham-
    Speeding up a pop song seems to work, but my output has glitches.
    The glitches happen even when you speed up by a factor of 1.0, which should in theory do an exact segment-by-segment copy. So the glitches come from an error somewhere in the process, above any errors that may be in the segmentation process.
Vinny-
    Wrote a small GMaps application for finding CS schools.
    Wants your support – workshopping support.
    Has started working on db support with Ruby on Rails.
    What is the most useful feature for you, applying to schools?
Titus-
    His Article is due Nov 1, it’s on doing PIC microcontroller sims in Linux.

Plan for Today:

Ben-
    Debug Settings object in JavaBeans.
Vinny-
    Leading discussion map app. Maybe gamey stuff in Commotion.
Graham-
    Refactor some of my segmentation, try to kill glitches.
Titus-
    Testing bleeding edge and fixing software GPSim, GPASM, SDCC, all to write an article.
Mike-
    Doing the school, math and linguistics.
Stephen-
    Nonlinear optimizations.

This Week’s Reality:

Graham-
    Stole music, chatted with Stephen and Mike, gave Vinny a use case. Suggested Dynamic Queries for CS Map.
Vinny-
    Installed rails, wrote caching scraper for college board. Collected use cases.
    Has compiled a document of several use cases for his systems.
Ben-
    Danced to the music, over and over and over again.
Titus-
    Working on his article, came up with examples. How to do interrupts (pushbutton), using the built-in timer. Should finish article this week.

Posted in Personal, Plans, Project | No Comments »

Hackfest 1001 Postmortem

Thursday, October 20th, 2005

–  Since Last Hackfest
    –  Luke
        –  found blurb about alpha Firefox UI feature, tabling his
              firefox project
        –  wrote simple CLI for jhymn  on Linux
        –  spent some time hacking a linux bootloader for palm treo
              (like GARUS)
    –  Matt
        –  Idea: chronological scale for google maps
    –  Graham
        –  Went to startup school
            –  Is going to write it about it tomorrow (says vinny, really on the weekend)
    –  Ben
        –  More autograding stuff – added something so that it can
              read in a request for a complete regrade of a test
        –  Made things nice and user friendly
    –  Vinny
        –  been playing with lisp/scheme, made cool drawings in
              logo/scheme
–  Today’s Plans
    –  Luke
        –  Website cleanup/maintenance
        –  play with Palm bootloader more
    –  Matt
        –  Haning out, might head home to work on PC
        –  Sketch user interfaces
    –  Graham
        –  Music editor is STARVING
            –  fixing "write with speedup"
    –  Ben
        –  Write something to let the TA run a specific method
    –  Vinny
        –  muck around with scheme/logo more
–  Today’s Realities
    –  Matt
        –  on vague timeline-animated-map-idea: babysteps, in the
              form of touching base on java(?) and GIS
        –  Also: brainstorming on a slick name, with approriately
              pretentious allusion
    –  Luke
        –  Got website things done.  TikiWIki updated.
        –  mail organizing and DHCP debugging via packet sniffing
    –  Graham
        –  Defeated the System.EngineExecutionException by
              reorganizing variables… marshalling issue?
            –  still buggy, tho
    –  Ben
        –  Reorganized some code
        –  read a lot of PhD Comics.com
    –  Vinny
        –  learned the shape of a nautilus shell
        –  wrote some scheme/logo to draw one

Posted in News, People, Places, Plans, Project | 4 Comments »

SNAKES ON A CARTESIAN OR PERHAPS MERCATOR PROJECTION

Thursday, October 20th, 2005

Here’s an edited for content and length, but not the size of your tv,  log of my talk with Graham, RE: map-time genesis:

(21:19:22) Matt J Alexander: also: I need a hip, pomo name.
(21:19:34) Matt J Alexander: Because a project without a name is nothing.
(21:19:49) Graham: will, you could insert meta into the title
(21:20:07) Graham: mapistry?
(21:21:19) Graham: metamap
(21:21:41) Graham: maplysses
(21:22:09) Matt J Alexander: hrm.
(21:22:25) Matt J Alexander: maplysses is interesting, but syntatically vague on proper pronunciation
(21:22:57) Graham: mapberto eco
(21:23:59) Matt J Alexander: I like the direction this is going in
(21:24:48) Graham: 100 years of map solitude
(21:25:05) Graham: maptavio paz
(21:25:39) Graham: maps joyce
(21:27:29) Matt J Alexander: So the current implementation idea is based on Event atom (or class,or whatever).
(21:27:49) Ravelite: ok, so an event moves a border then?
(21:27:58) Matt J Alexander: A border would be an Event.
(21:28:12) Matt J Alexander: An Event can be one or more Events, or a vector/tuple.
(21:28:19) Matt J Alexander: Vector being:
(21:28:38) Ravelite: ahhhh, so a border event is a vector of border vertices
(21:28:59) Matt J Alexander: {(where: GIS date[lat.,long.elev.]), time, country/tribe, person, short/long descriptions, causes, image/connector images, accuracy}
(21:29:05) Ravelite: so events have a limited time of validity,
(21:29:13) Ravelite: and are replaced by more current ones?
(21:29:27) Matt J Alexander: Yeah. I’m not sure if this is covered by accuracy or would need something like "lifespan"
(21:29:41) Ravelite: Well, probably you don’t need lifespan,
(21:29:46) Ravelite: just chose the most recent.
(21:29:51) Matt J Alexander: I’m also not sure if this ends up with overly large dataset.
(21:29:56) Ravelite: that partitions the timelime well enough
(21:30:07) Matt J Alexander: Since a border would necessitate several events as points just to define all the curves.
(21:30:15) Ravelite: yes
(21:30:42) Matt J Alexander: Is there a more elegant way, or can I just fall back on the mantra of SPACE IS CHEAP, TIME IS EXPENSIVE
(21:31:10) Ravelite: Well, go for simplest to make a prototype.,
(21:31:18) Ravelite: avoid premature optimization
(21:31:28) Ravelite: assume you will throw away this prototype
(21:32:08) Matt J Alexander: Historically, are even the most ardously planned out prototypes thrown out?
(21:32:19) Matt J Alexander: Or do arduously planned prototypes just never get created :p
(21:32:38) Ravelite: well, it’s just one of my design philosophies
(21:32:48) Ravelite: I just think it’s hardest to create something from the start
(21:32:50) Matt J Alexander: One Luke shares
(21:32:59) Ravelite: and you will learn many obvious things once it is build
(21:33:07) Ravelite: that you can’t imagine about right now
(21:33:12) Matt J Alexander: True: certainly I don’t have any domain knowledge about mapping currently
(21:33:25) Matt J Alexander: And only barely so in history
(21:33:39) Ravelite: I agree with your point, the more planning, the harder to do and the greater chance it doesn’t happen
(21:33:59) Ravelite: and most planning will be made irrelevant unless you know a lot about the domain
(21:34:08) Ravelite: and since your app is highly experimental,
(21:34:18) Ravelite: almost no one knows about the domain right now

Posted in Project | No Comments »

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