Senior Seminar / Final Quarter Chapter 2

January 27th, 2007 by

This week has been busy, but rewarding.

Senior Seminar:
   This week I met with my professor on Wednesday. I showed him a possible outline. He thought it was too much for a 30 minute talk, so I am pairing down the focus for the talk to just the Fourier Transform.
    I began reading a book entitled "The Discrete Fourier Transform" by D. Sundararajan. It is pretty clear so far, and seems to be a good starting point.
    I started making power point slides on the Sampling Theorem before I met with my professor, so I will have to go back and edit the presentation.
    I  took a break from reading Virtannen this week. The paper for the class will still be about polyphonic source separation, but for now I need to focus on the talk.

Latin:
    I got caught up. Practiced declensions, and read the stories from chapters 21 and 22.

Real Analysis:
    I did another homework assignment.  We had a quiz on Wednesday. I got 9/10 on the quiz and 8/10 on the first homework assignment. Hopefully this trend will continue. This class is really interesting.

Things are coming together.

Posted in Misc, Personal, Project | No Comments »

Hackfest 111000 Mortem

January 19th, 2007 by graham

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.

Posted in People, Places, Plans, Project | No Comments »

Senior Seminar / Final Quarter Chapter 1

January 19th, 2007 by

Hello everyone. I’m Mike. I’m studying mathematics at University of California at Santa Cruz. This is my last quarter and I have a talk that I have to give, and a senior project that I have to do.  The idea of these posts will be to track my progress on this project, and my progress in my other classes. I hope that this will help motivate me to do my very best in my last year in university.

Here is the class rundown in order of difficulty:
   Senior Seminar
   Real Analysis
   Latin 2
 
Here is the broad view:
   Senior Seminar:
       Give a 35 minute talk on a mathematical topic, on February 7th
       Turn in a 10 page paper on the topic by the end of the quarter.

    Real Analysis:  
       Weekly homework. Due Wednesdays.
       Reading.
       Tests.

    Latin 2:
       Homework for class 3 times a week.
       Reading.
       Tests.

Listing these is already starting to make things feel more manageable.

Now for some more details on my Senior Seminar:
    I want to study polyphonic source separation algorithms. Through what little research I have done so far I have realized that this is too broad a topic to fit into a 35 minute talk. So, my first task is to narrow down what I will talk about. As it stands right now, maybe a short talk on the Discrete Fourier Transform would be good. Right now, the basic structure might go something like this:

1. Explain in broad terms how digital audio works.  Samples, sampling frequency, possibly the sampling theorem, Nyquist frequency, etc.
2. Explain the mathematics of the Discrete Fourier Transform. Maybe, talk about the Fourier Transforms uses in other branches of math and science.
3. Explain what polyphonic source separation is, and how the Fourier Transform is used as a tool in polyphonic source separation algorithms.

    Somewhere in there I want to talk about psycoacoustics, and cognitive science, but maybe there is not enough time to do that and I will have to save it for the paper.

In conclusion I will leave a list of things that I need to do in the following week:
    Senior Seminar:
       Continue reading Tuomas Virtanen‘s thesis on polyphonic source separation.
       Write a possible outline, and bring it to my professor on Monday.

    Real Analysis:
       Complete homework assignment. Do at least 1 problem every day.
       Finish reading chapter 1. Begin Chapter 2.

    Latin:
       Catch up on backlogged homework. (Tomorrow!)
       Stay caught up. Do a little every day.

Next time I will review my accomplishments, and I will describe a technique developed by my parents to help get ideas down on paper.

-Mike

Posted in Computer Music, Misc, Personal, Research | 1 Comment »

ASP .NET (for work, ARGH)

January 14th, 2007 by

hey gentlefolk;

long time no post.  sorry!  🙁

i was wondering if anybody had some good resources for ASP .NET that they would like to share?  work has decided to send me in this direction and i need better guidance.  i’ve been using these articles:

http://www.asp.net/learn/dataaccess/tutorial01cs.aspx?tabid=63

and

http://www.asp.net/learn/dataaccess/tutorial02cs.aspx?tabid=63

but then it goes off on a tangent, which doesn’t apply to my current situation.  i’ve got the rudimentary framework in place (data access layer, business logic layer) for my application, but that’s about it.  any links or books you recommend would be of great help.  danke!

Posted in A Boring Default, atlChat | 3 Comments »

Hackfest 110111 Mortem

January 11th, 2007 by graham

11 Jan 2007 – no djs!

what we’re working on:
Mark- compiling chuck OSC support for XPCOM.
Puyan- copying theory notes.
Graham- working on chuck firefox plugin.

progress:

Graham- looked at miniAudicle source code.
Spencer mentioned that it was an example of a classic chuck embedding.

Posted in Computer Music | No Comments »

Hackfest 110110 Mortem

January 4th, 2007 by graham

4 January 2007 – more loud djs

The music seemed to be less loud tonight. But it was because they moved the PA from the tables area over to the bar area. Which made the experience slightly better.

Mark and Graham have a great collaboration idea. We want to improvise together (js and ChucK).
This was inspired by Mark’s shape livecoding work.

Our plan is to have one of us create a "pulse" of OSC events – and then both of us can create synthesis code that works within the pulse. That way, both the graphics and music are synchronized.

Since it doesn’t look like javascript has support for OSC yet, Mark may have to create an OSC implementation using priviledged js code that uses a socket library (nsIServerSocket). Once this is done, we should be able to start jamming together.

Posted in Computer Graphics, Computer Music | No Comments »

Hackfest 101110.1 Postmortem – Blast from the past.

December 15th, 2006 by

Its late and Graham owes me a punch in the stomach, but I hope this is a case of better late than never!  From 8-17-2006

This Past Week:

Graham:

  • Try to use more sample in chuck environment in preparation for a Laptop Battle.
  • Started some work towards a collaborative chuck site.

Alex:

  • Borrowed a twiddler and had some fun. — Hopefully the arm is much better now?

Luke:

  • Some PVR work with mythtv.

That Night…

Alex and Graham:

  • A refocus on research.
  • Determine some mechanisms to test whether the application is choosing good sequences.

Luke:

  • Some webserver configuration to make services accessible from the office. Specifically I installed and started using Anyterm.

Posted in Brain Candy | 1 Comment »

Hackfest 110101 Mortem

December 14th, 2006 by graham

14 December 2006 – dj night again!

new member profile:
Jason Ho –
qaboom.com – Question and answer community for colleges
– ie "how to change folder colors in unix terminal, top five roadtrip movies, risks of eating preservatives, lucky buddha on 10th street hit or miss"
Ti calculator community- Alien Invation – Legend of Zelda clone
went to Small Business Administration today for startup advice
They suggest you start with a partnership agreement.

He added admin area to his site this week.
Tonight he’s doing formatting for the tag browsing

Jason learned from working out-
he finds that you plateau for muscle groups- switching activities helps you mitigate this.

Mark-
learned Hirigana- lifted rubberized weights at SAC.
Implemented decision trees.
Will do a flickr photo presentation, and a shapes livecoding at New Year’s Eve.
Playing with idea of physical sorters, decision trees.

Erik-
will build a webapp for ilovesittingonchairs.com
rapid rails prototyping – friend Nick will be doing design
upload pictures of people sitting on chairs
(Seth Godin– internet marketing god according to Erik)

Graham-
Worked on different variation techniques in chuck.
Registered elbowpatch.es for new music project.
Tony liked my CD!

Posted in Brain Candy | 1 Comment »

atlHack Meeting Spot in CNN/Money

December 9th, 2006 by ynniv

Octane Coffee, atlHack’s weekly meetup spot, is mentioned on CNN’s website as a spot for startups to woo investors.  atlHack has never had any formal association with Octane, but its been a consistently good place (which has never thrown us out :-D) to meet up and talk about trendy tech.

Posted in News, Places | No Comments »

Atlanta Startup Links

December 9th, 2006 by ynniv

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.

Posted in People, Places, Plans | No Comments »

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