Luz is a music visualization studio, written in the beautiful and expressive Ruby programming language.

This Saturday, Oct 4, please join us for an all-day Luz code camp, including:

• Code tours. The author of Luz will step through code, explaining how things work, why they work that way, and seeking advice on how to deal with a few open issues.

• Tutorials. We will develop some new and needed plugins together, live.

• Mini-sprints. Eg. the beat tapping code doesn't feel quite perfect. (If you've never tweaked Ruby algorithms to get them to feel right, you'll love this process!)

This event is primarily for Ruby programmers, or others interested in learning Ruby.

We'll be in the "Roman" conference room at CubeSpace (622 SE Grand Ave., Portland OR).

Hope to see you there!

This month's topic is "Data Visualization and Exploration Techniques Using R and Postgres" with PSU's Dr Christopher Monsere.

Full details: http://pugs.postgresql.org/node/1669

We have 4 speakers lined up for the popular show-n-tell format.

==Kevin Lynagh==

Kevin writes code that makes pictures of data on the Internet. He lives in Portland, Oregon and spends as much time rock climbing as he does in the REPL. WeatherTable is an HTML5 weather app for the iPhone. Kevin will talk about why they decided to build an app in such an established category (hint: visualization) and why they decided to do it using ClojureScript, HTML, and CSS instead of doing a native ObjectiveC app.

==Matthew Lyon==

Matthew is a lead developer and software architect at Portland-based Platform-as-a-Service company AppFog. He was one of the core developers of AppFog's first product, PHP Fog, and led development of AppFog itself. He will be doing a show-and-tell about an instrumentation and visualization system he created to help troubleshoot and improve AppFog's Service Oriented Architecture and worldwide network of public cloud hosting services.

==Ryan Miller==

Ryan is a UI developer with over 10 years of experience with web applications. Ryan specializes in data visualization, which he works on at home when he can't get his fix at work. Ryan will be showing some experiments he's been doing in d3 with local weather data.

==Periscopic==

Periscopic is a socially-conscious data visualization firm. They will be discussing their latest internal project: U.S. Gun Murders in 2010.

Please see the agenda and RSVP at the Meetup: http://www.meetup.com/PDX-Data-Visualization/events/103543552/

Yes, Hacks/Hackers PDX is still alive! We have two co-organizers, M. Edward (@znmeb) Borasky and Melissa (@capnleela) Chavez.

For January we’re having a 2014 kickoff round table with lightning talks. We want to hear what journalists and developers are working on and where more collaboration is needed.

speaker: Joachim Breitner

abstract: We will take you on a guided tour through the memory of a running Haskell program and get to peek at the raw bytes of Haskell values. We’ll see how uniformity allows for polymorphic functions and data structures, where the garbage collector finds the information it needs and learn to predict how large certain values tend to become. With the help of a visualization tool (ghc-vis) we will also see laziness and sharing at work, and reveal the mystery of how Haskell fits infinite data structures into a finite amount of memory.

bio: Joachim Breitner is a PhD student at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany, where he works on the semantics of lazy functional programming language and on interactive theorem provers. He maintains the Haskell packages for Debian and Ubuntu and contributes to GHC. When he is AFK, he enjoys board games, swing dancing, softball and paragliding.

Hobson Lane will be doing a case study on recent work done on Hack Oregon's Behind the Curtain project.

He'll walk through several things:

• Using python sets and pandas to find relationships between database tables, between politicians and the Ashley Madison dump, and between political action committees that you'd never imagine would support each other.

• Using sklearn and TFIDF to compare committee descriptions.

• Using d3 force-directed graphs to do interactive visualization and clustering on that network of connections.

Another joint meetup with the Portland Data Science Group.