Stephen may recognize a few names in this culture initiative at Emory. Unfortunately this is a conference and pre-registration is expensive for the casual Lessig fanboy ($115). Paying at the door is around $30 more, so your best bet is to hang out front with a large sign telling Larry that you want have his baby.
Registration closes September 30th.
Our first posted hack fest, this time at Octane Coffee
What do you want atlHack to be?
Hey guys. I applied a new theme that I’ve been working on. Its a derivative of “spreadfirefox”, if you’ve heard of that one. Hopefully you think its rockin’.
finally got my lazy arse to setup my althack.org account. thanks vinny!
Creating Passionate Users proposes that one way for software to be engaging is to have a number of “levels” which users naturally progress through to achieve greater mastery.
Here are some proposed level tasks for Mused users and developers. They range from Level One: Music Fan to Level Ten: Grand Collage Ninja.
1. Simple Modification – Take an existing music track and speed up the tempo, or change the key.
Sample Addition – Take an existing track, add samples from another song.
Sample Addition-Subtraction – Take an existing track, delete rhythmic or melodic material to leave holes, and add material from other music to replace it.
Harmonic Meddling – Take an existing track, and change the key of a limited part of the song.
Static Tempo Mixtape – Take a string of tracks, and modify them to have the same tempo. Cross-fade between them in the transitions.
Dynamic Tempo Mixtape – Take a string of tracks, and change the tempo smoothly from one track to the next, as well as crossfading between them in the transitions.
Power Hour – Create a beatmatched one hour mix for Jim’s Power Hour.
Stylized Mixtape – Make either a Static or Dynamic Tempo Mixtape with elements of Simple Modification, Sample Addition or Subtraction, and Harmonic Meddling in each song. Come up with a creative concept for the mixtape.
Classic Mash (Sample Addition x2) – Take two familiar but stylistically different songs and interlace them.
Cover Song (Sample Addition x5) – Recreate a musical track as in Sample Addition, but draw most of the musical material from at least 10 tracks in equal proportions.
Creative Composition – Make an original composition from 10’s of songs, using bits of vocals, rhythms, and instrument lines in new arrangements.
10. Comprehensive Composition – Create a song with a totally novel structure containing samples from 100’s of different tracks, each of them lending a recognizible style to the song, but without any full melodies lifted from one particular piece.
This approach affords several benefits. It gives a set of intermediate milestones for development. Once development is finished, it provides a clear path (like a tutorial) for a user to gain mastery in progressively difficult tasks. Also, it makes us all feel like ninjas. Which is good.
Commotion is a realtime graphics system that I have been working on for
a while. It’s Objective-C, OpenGL, and some Cocoa. I had
started work on it in 2003 for Sha Xin Wei at Georgia Tech‘s New Media
Center (in the LCC) as a text animation system. We were working
on the next generation of Hubbub, and Commotion was meant to be a
replacement for ActiveText, a Windows / DirectX animation system by Jason Lewis.
Commotion has still not become as mature as ActiveText, and since Xin
Wei’s move to Canada, it has strayed from the original goal of text
animation to a more broad goal of realtime dynamic object management.
If I were to describe what Commotion does in 30 seconds or less, it would go something like this:
Tristan Jehan
Ross Bencina
Francois Pachet
Places where you can Learn to Get your Hack On
Universities
Georgia Tech
Depending on what kind of career you’re looking for, there are probably quicker routes. Then again you might learn something.
Non-Traditional
Big Nerd Ranch
Technical bootcamps in retreat settings.
Fun Tech Culture that’s based in Atlanta
Homestar Runner (HR Wiki)
Beloved internet mascots Homestar and Strongbad, and the obsessive collaborative fansite that loves them. Worship the Brothers Chapps!
Lifeform Project
Hometown electronic music label that does periodic laptop shows at bars and restaurants.
Atlanta Bloggers
A group of Atlanta bloggers who get together and go out and drink once a month.