Atlhack

Mark was at Octane to hack for the first time in many weeks.
Tejus arrived later and they chatted about Vertical Acuity, Pardot, SITA, Georgia Tech, etc.

Mark wrote some python, installed nltk, pyPdf, xpdf, plasTeX, and probably some other software too. He’s building something that makes visual art out of abstract math.

Things learned:
1) Many PDFs don’t contain word breaks, they just position the letters in the right spot on the page, gasp!
2) Installing pdftotext via MacPorts installs all sorts of stuff: OpenMotif, libxml2, xorg-libXdmcp, etc, etc, etc.
3) pdftolatex is pretty sweet
4) Apple’s Automator can convert PDFs into text, and by default outputs UTF-16, which scares tools like diff into thinking it is binary
5) arXiv.org hosts the LaTeX for papers, which maintains lots of extra contextual information, which is awesome
6) The world sure is full of things

marilyn: almost done with a little cgi to post to my website
kelly: embedding a font in his flash adventure game

We’ll probably take a hiatus here in Athens for these coming holiday weeks — hope everyone has some great ones!

Greetings from the frozen north!

Alex:
- fixing Ubuntu install on the netbook (video drivers for Poulsbo chipset keep getting screwed up)
- thinking about what to do for the Spring — brainstorming research projects for machine translation with limited resources, mailing professors asking them to be on my committee, wibbling about classes
- should be hacking on the verbs project, because it got accepted to MTML workshop!
- over the weekend: hacking on the Snippets project

Lindsey:
- furiously reading for quals: going to be a qualified phd candidate in just over a week!

Rebecca:
- reading a paper about Blame (correct attribution of type errors in dynamic languages): “blame assignment for dependent contracts”. Ask her or Lindsey or sstrickl what that means?
- thinking about contributing to NLTK

Kelly and I got together for the second inaugural ClassyHack here in Athens, but both had some preliminary tasks to address:

Marilyn:

- Downloading XCode for an app beyond the Hello World aka Happy Birthday Dad app I made for my dad’s birthday

Kelly:

- Working on an old laptop to see if it’s usable
- Debating netbook purchase

We’ll probably have one or two more informal meetings in the next month and then start up a little more epically with the start of the new year. A few other people have expressed interest — one a friend of mine who randomly met Alex and Mark at a wedding in Atlanta a few months ago and got started talking about Ruby.

Speaking of weddings, add to the above agenda: we also talked about the awesomeness of Alex’s recent engagement!

Bruce:
Writing a suffix tree implementation in C++
Testing on text that looks like: “aaabbabaaaabbbbabbbbbb”
Useful for searching, compression, etc.

Mark:
Relearning git
Implementing a mass-spring system using shape-meshing code written this weekend
Both the Euler and Verlet integrators are unstable

Bruce:
– pattern matching homework
– (since last week) invented a heinous beverage: the fourlokomotive

Joe:
– fixing DNS setup for mental tarpit
– using mercurial to version his code

Mark:
– working on qualifier questions

A conversation, wherein the interrogatee avoids the question:
Mark: Did you vote? I hope you voted against Amendment 1.
Humza: I voted the right way.
Mark: Does that mean…
Humza: I voted for what was right.

Hacking in Bloomington!

I’ve been helping Eric H a bit on a paper about training classifiers for webspam detection (sort of a “how to do machine learning for your security problem” paper), and I was supposed to write about Naive Bayes classifiers. It occurred to me that I’d never implemented one.

So I did! It’s straightforward, because naive classifier is naive.

Also, I did a bit of hacking on Snippets, which is like weekly atlhack notes for people’s non-side projects. It’s up and running, and some people at Indiana are even using it! As of last night, it sends weekly reminders to people, so they’ll remember to update (these are opt-in).

*hugs from the frozen north*
– alexr

The Atlhack tradition continues, though we’ve become less disciplined about documenting our adventures. This lack of discipline also means that we tend to hack less, and chat/homework more.

Can honor be restored to this land? Tune in next week to see our heros attempt to resurrect ancient and mythical side-projects…

Bruce
- homework time: matlab + least squares approx + economic research methods
Joe
- attended SIEGE
- building memory-tar-pit-organizer-game
Mark & Stuart
- chatting about startup possibilities
- chatting with Hamza & Dustin
Rob
- attended SIEGE
- writing article for the technique
Alsie
- online math homework

Rob
– Reviewed Machete for the Technique: evisceration

Mark
– Laplacian curve editing, matrix solvers

22 August 2010 – hacking in Octane, 2:20 Sunday afternoon

present are Mark and Graham
Matt, who is in the last year of ugrad, who makes experimental recordings, and who wants to move to Brazil, is our barista.
we met Brandon, who is involved in a lot of ATL startup culture, who is doing some integration with SalesForce, also he is an award winning area debate coach.

since last week:
Mark- came back from Disney in Burbank, CA, where he worked on technology intern and he should publish sometime soon.
He is readjusting to ATL humidity after being in the LA desert.
Graham- participated in classyHack, (see notes here), where I worked on formulating convex problems.

this meeting’s plans:
Mark- some kind of NPR edge thickness based on shading. Hopes to finish the rendering and make images.
Graham- will start with some odd tasks for administration, then install Matlab and try to hack in CVX into his superposition mosaicing.

to remember: Kunst Haus in Graz.

this meeting’s reality:
Graham- chatted, wrote email to boss, booked a flight for DAFx ’10 in Graz.
Mark- wrote some Processing Java for detecting and shading silhouettes, currently debugging.