Atlhack

Lots of old friends, a little bit of hacking.

Jason Ho is back in town from Taipei, will be moving to Silicon Valley in a few months.
Puyan Lotfi is back from Microsoft/Seattle, doing a Master’s Degree in CS at GT.
The Reverend Emily Case is hanging out and writing a sermon.
Sonali had eye surgery and Tejus will soon. Their company is having trouble.

Puyan also brought along fellow Master’s students, who are hacking on a Knowledge-Base AI detective problem.
And the usual suspects, Mark and Rob are hanging out and maybe writing some interactive fiction.

Rob
– hacking interactive fiction with Inform
– going to make a game where you fall asleep to go back in time

Mark
– writing some Processing code for school
– went to the Freeside meeting and got my keycard

Alex’s going-away-hack.

Rob
– doing CSS with Kelly
– going to karaoke
Kelly
– searching for jobs
– updating her online resume
– using Firebug!
Erik
– didn’t install Ruby 1.9.1
– playing WoW
Sonali
– fixing production issues for work
– survived layoffs
Tejus
– working on CSS refactoring
– survived layoffs
Emily
– learning HAML
– finding her way around a Sinatra session
Molly
– reading her RSS on Emily’s computer
– finished knitting her tank top
Alex
– working on passive-voice-detector with NLTK
– has it mostly working
Mark
– trying out new Mac software
– working on a processing sketch for Corkbird

We discussed exercise, CouchDB & MongoDB & Lucene, that bridge at Marietta St and Jones Ave, shooting lasers from your hips, Encyclopedia Brown fan-fic.

Alex Rae:
– doing some software engineering management planning things
Bill:
– wrote some lyrics
– wrote a thing which is almost an essay and posted on the internet
Erik:
– fixed his RSpec’s
– prepared for a conference call on Monday that didn’t happen
John:
– started a new project “meal-o-rific”
– meal-planning-grocery-shopping-recipe-tracking app
– almost got it talking with google calendar
Alex Rudnick:
– reviewing more CIKM papers
Lindsey:
– learning about monads from a category theory perspective
– is the co-author on a paper, so now she has to help edit it
Rob:
– playing with OSC, frustration
– drew a diagram on how to play a film on several screens at once
Mark:
– reading about pattern formation
– switching to Firefox from Safari so that he can use Zotero

This hack was on Tuesday 7 July 2009, right when you might imagine it would have been! Pardon for the delay in posting the notes.

Hackfest 10011110: lots-of-people hack!

Rob:
- write a Technique article about Michael Jackson
- reading about the Dreamcast, for unknown reasons
- OK, really reading about games that feature MJ
- headed off to sing karaoke

Bill:
- tried to write some lyrics
- came up with some about being creative, and also Neil Armstrong and how reclusive he is.
- installed Chrome for Linux

Emily:
- read rss
- looked at stackoverflow

John:
- wrote tests for his webgame
- also read stackoverflow

Tripp:
- showed up!
- chatted with Alex
- discussing REST (etc) with John

Mark:
- made a sketch with Processing
- added notifications to Corkbird so he knows when somebody signs up

Alex:
- looking at a paper for CIKM
- excited about reviewing papers (woo!)
- talking about GWT with Tripp

Hackfest 10011101! The hack without a name.

Rob:
- making art.
- made a four-color picture of Ric Flair, Warhol style!!
- We’ll put a link soon.

Mark:
- sent in a logo to the Freeside people
- tried to figure out Google Calendar API to integrate with an IRC bot

Lindsey and Alex:
- this week: competed in ICFP Contest 2009!!
- will blog about it soon
- maybe found a house
- tonight: Alex chilled out and read blogs, thought about typos

It’s hot and sweaty outside (and also in our brains) hack!

Bill:
- Chatted with Alex about netbooks, work, GIS systems, programming languages
- played some nethack

Emily:
- Tried to figure out why mongodb hates twitter (maybe having issues with the Twitpocalypse)
- Read some RSSs

Alex:
- worked on detecting some typos, found a pretty serious bug in the typo detect-o-matic
- so close to being done with this part of the detect-o-matic
- drank a lot of coffee

Lindsey (remote):
- yesterday, gave a talk at Beer ‘n’ Algorithms about Turing Machines with oracles and relativization

Mark:
- Stuck at work, unfortunately. Possibly working on plugging in to Outlook? …

Alternating fits of intense concentration and socializing hack!

Rob:
- made a chiptune (”a chip-ette tune”)
- looked at stuff for school

Alex:
- detecting some typos: finishing up the feature generator, appreciating the parser setup
- 2009 Alex is a much better software engineer than 2006-2007 Alex
- chatted with Zach G and Lindsey

Lindsey:
- furious paper-writing session with Dave B; sudden inspiration struck
- triangular substitutions are awesome for implementing logical programming for Scheme

Sonali:
- working on javascript stuff for dayjob

Tejus:
- setting up development tools on the Ubuntu Netbook Remix install on his netbook
- chatting with Alex about Linux, Ubuntu, and netbooks

Mark:
- working on CorkBird!
- adding comments and ajax paging

Get Excited Make Stuff Hack!

Met Lauren and Kyle (new members who don’t know it yet):
- getting into twitter, trying to get lots of twitter followers (they’re @LAliciaKeyz and @KYeasley).
- Cewebrity status imminent.

Rob
- Started setting up a wordpress blog
- LOAD THE SPACESHIP WITH THE ROCKET FUEL. Chopping up wrestling promo videos with Ableton.
- finding cs1315 really easy, thinking about Technology of Representation and open standards in history

Mark
- Building a processing sketch to make randomized maps of suburban neighborhoods. With the Voronoi algorithm.
- had dinner with his brother Paul

Alex
- setting up the adorable new laptop (Dell Mini 12 with Ubuntu 9.04), made a script to turn off touchpad so he doesn’t accidentally click on things while typing
- set up wiki pages to study for quals
- worked a little bit on typo detection

Lindsey
- finishing reading The Reasoned Schemer, which is proving to be illuminating about logic programming with Scheme
- starting in on Modern Operating Systems tonight!