We arrived in PIT around 2, but didn’t get to our room until 540pm… the joys of public transportation. We settled at the BnB we got to and headed back to CMU to see if we could make it to Thursday registration, with 20 minutes left that was really hoping too much. As expected we missed Thursday’s registration hours and decided to wander the halls of the School of Computer Science buildings, the wandering yielded interesting finds: old computer manuals in the hallways as well as old discarded hardware in some corridor, and found a copy of Simon Peyton Jones’ “The Implementation of Programming Languages” at the library among other things.
Once we got tired of walking around, we headed to Lulu’s to get something to eat before heading to our room and getting some rest in preparation for an early morning on Friday.
Early morning, left without having any breakfast just so we could catch the bus to CMU and make it to registration. After registration (and a minor hiccup w/ my records) I had five minutes to get something to eat before running out to catch my first workshop, iPhone Programming with openFrameworks. The workshop was great, I had some issues at the beginning because I hadn’t done any of the prep-work (turns out gmail decided to filter the email Memo sent with the prep-work details) and had to update my iphone SDK, which in turn required me to move files around because I was out of space on my main HD… a mess. Once I got that sorted out I was able to catch up with the rest, the hands-on workshop walked us through the writing a pong game for the iphone using oF, compiling for the simulator, creating a provisioning profile, and loading the final game into the device. We didn’t get to the sections about adding assets (graphics, sound, fonts, etc.) to the game, but got all the important parts done, I think if we hadn’t had that email snafu we would have very well gone through the whole thing.
During the lunch break there were some interesting informal presentations on a variety of subjects, adopting technology in education, using chemical sensors with microcontrollers (or at least how to collect the data properly), HCI, twitter data visualizations, and more. Steve and I had a chance to talk with someone from HackPGH about their open house that evening and got directions to the place.
Afterwards we headed to the Interactive Telephony workshop to learn about Asterisk and how to hook it up to our programs. I finally had a chance to look into Asterisk (been avoiding it for a long time) and learned about setting up data plans, their logic, and how to hook asterisk to external programs by using AGI. We finished the workshop with some Asterisk, PHP, Processing program combo and some discussion about setting up the system and obtaining a dial in number provider. I came out of there with some interesting ideas about hooking assistive agents to an Asterisk system for remote access… soon.
In the evening, CMU was hosting a talk by James Gosling (of JAVA fame) about his love child, the Java Programming Language. It was an interesting talk, even if I’m not particularly fond of the language, the kind of talk I never get a chance to attend in MIA. It was pretty funny that while I was in this talk, there was a flame war going on in my Facebook wall about Java (of all things)… thanks Fibo.
After getting something quick at a corner Subway, we decided to hike to the HackPittsburgh space… oh was that a dumb idea, not only it was cold and windy, but that walk was a good 3 miles. I usually don’t mind walking 3 miles, but on those conditions and with barely any sleep it was no fun.
The HackPittsburgh visit was great, the space is nice and the HackPGH members were great. It was cool getting to talk to them about their experiences starting up and running things, hear different people’s take on hackerspaces, and just have a fun time. The conversation with Marty about the Makerbot clarified a lot of things about the machine for me and eased some of my concerns about getting one (it also raised a couple of new ones). We had some fun was had with the Punch machine, the laser harp on the corner, some minor coding, and the claw machine (which apparently likes to mock people). Also had a chance to meet other hackers travling to PIT for Mobile Art & Code, the guys from Baltimore and Boston, and Dave from Tampa who had some questions about getting started on openFrameworks.
At one point we found out that Matt and Jon live pretty close to where we were staying and – after calling us crazy for walking all the way from CMU – offered to give us a ride back to our room (we later found out close was literally “around the corner”). The ride back with Matt gave us a chance to learn a bit more about the city, the hackerspace, and other things. Before we parted ways, Matt told us to meet him at his place next morning at 815 and he’d give us a ride to campus.
Saturday morning came and Steve decided to sleep in. I contemplated staying inside my sleeping bag to catch up on sleep, but I resisted the urge to sleep in, got ready, and headed downstairs with the intention of leaving, but Stephanie stopped me an insisted I had some breakfast. Breakfast was delicious and yet I couldn’t stop looking at my watch, I was already up this early so it would suck if I missed Matt. This was almost the case, once I was out and turning around the corner to get to Matt’s place I saw him just making a turn on the next street, I missed him by seconds!. Now, I knew there was no way I could catch him, but that didn’t stop me from trying and as soon as I started running up the hill (unlike Miami, PGH is riddled with them) Matt was turning back towards his home. He had seen me out of the corner of his eye as I had made the turn and rounded back to pick me up.
The talks on Saturday were pretty inspiring. Got a chance to learn about MobiSpray, saw some of the cool stuff being done on the iphone with openFrameworks, got to hear about PD running on all sort of devices, got a chance to hear the authors behind some of the projects I’ve seen online before talk about their work and their themes. The entire day of talks was great. At one point during the day I attended an unofficial iphone jailbreak session and after hearing about the process – easy as it is – I opted for not jailbreaking my device… maybe in the future. Steve got to the talks around 11 and during lunch he was at the Mr. Rogers set across from CMU with some of the HackPGH fellows.
In the evening we headed to the Brillobox where we met Max, Scott, Derek, and a few others. When we got there, Jet was by himself on the second floor pretty much waiting for people to get there so he could help them set up… so with nothing going on yet, we headed back down to have dinner. Food was pretty good and the dinner conversation even better, we talked about mobile platforms, programming languages, Derek talked to us a bit about Playpower, and we got to question Max about the CMU Comp. Sci curriculum. Afterwards we made it to the second floor for electronic music performances by Leslie Flanigan, The Loud Objects, Lauren G and Riley Harmon. After a while Steve and I went outside to play around with MobiSpray and talk to others out there.
There was a get together with some of the HackPGH guys at Jon’s place, but by the time we made it back to our room we were so tired we just went to bed.
I made it late to the PD workshop because I forgot buses generally run on a different schedule on Sundays, luckily didn’t miss much as I had already done the prep work Hans had mentioned in his email a few days back. Hans showed us the kind of things we could do with PD on the iphone, he described the hack that allows us to create patches in PD that can be run on the iphone through RJDJ… cool stuff. PD is amazing.
Lunch presentations ranged from a discussion on Quality of Service for mobile networks, a really cool program to draw with the wiimote, Camura (a site to upload images, cready by Marty from HackPGH), the Keepon (I had never bothered to learn more about thinking it was just some silly toy, only to find out there’s interesting work being done with it and it’s in itself a pretty complex robot… it’s always refreshing to see robotics applications outside of the defense/military field), as well as a Makerbot demo. I gave Steve a call to make sure he had made it to the airport in time for his flight back to MIA.
The afternoon workshop in SMS while interesting, it was more informative than hands on practice (even though we got enough of that). This is not bad since it actually taught me a bunch of things I didn’t know about SMS, the red tape that surrounds all of this, and how simple it really is (and should be). I also realized I had met the David’s partner once at one of the HOPE conferences in NYC… interesting. I left this workshop with some interesting ideas for SMS based applications, I will have to make some time to work on them. In the evening, we got to see a demonstration of the musical intruments created during the Scrapyard Challenge… cool stuff.
At one point, Jon told me that he was taking one of the presenters to the airport next morning and offered me a ride with him so I didn’t have to deal with the bus and stuff. Afterwards I just wandered around campus, talked to some people, and finally decided to head to my room to sleep.
Finally got a chance to sleep a few hours extra. At 10:40 Jon picked me up and we went to pick up Zach before heading out to the aiport. During the ride Jon was pointing out some of the places around the city (quite instructional, and I’ll be sure to check out some the places he recommended next time I’m in PGH). Once in the airport Zach and I went to get something to eat, we talked about Parsons, ITP, speech recognition software, and a few other school things. Later at the waiting room for his plane we were joined by Jonah Brucker-Cohen and Katherine Moriwaki – who were boarding the same plane Zach was – at this point the discussion turned a bit to Miami and they mentioned an electronics store that sold components, something I didn’t even know about… interesting the things you learn from others about the city you lived in for 9 years.
Once I was by myself, I sat down to finish the pong game we were working on at the oF workshop, it didn’t take me very long until I was done with it and had a fully functioning game of pong for the iphone (maybe I should add an AI for solo play).
This pretty much closes this past weekend for me. Came back to Miami pretty inspired to get some of my projcts finished and start on new ones, also glad to have met other people doing cool stuff, I’ll definitely be back for the next Art && Code.
—L.