108th Monthly Technical Session

Every month, HENNGE hosts technical talks on various subjects that our members wish to share with their peers. On July 21st, 2023, we had our 108th session. Like most recent sessions, this was a hybrid remote and on-site talk done via Zoom and in the HENNGE offices in Shibuya. There were six speakers on a varied set of topics for this session.

Introductions

Before talks began though, the night’s MC introduced the rules of the event as well as introductions for new HENNGE Members. A special call-out was also extended to the interns attending the day’s event. Soon after the introductions, the event pivoted towards the scheduled tech talks.

Hikari Internet Rabbit Hole

The first tech talk was given by Fluke and focused on the “rabbit hole” that could be encountered while trying to research internet problems in Tokyo. The talk focused primarily on the issues faced by a subset of NTT Flet’s customers who have modems that do not implement IPoE properly and are reliant on NTT’s single PPPoE concentrator. It turns out that switching modems and asking to change settings for one’s account can radically speed up internet speeds.

Introduction to CodeQL

The second talk of the night was given by Henry Helm. This presentation focused on CodeQL and how to use it to improve code security via query-based code inspection. The tool can be used to find vulnerabilities and enables custom security check queries to help find problems so code can be more readily improved. The queries run relatively fast and are formatted in a similar way to database SQL queries, so its relatively easy to use. The talk ended with a demonstration of CodeQL in action.

Visualizer for a Learning Application

Next, Nicholas Dwiarto had a presentation titled “Creating a Visualizer for a Learning Application”. This talk focused on using Duolingo’s apis and a number of other tools to better visualize his learning progress on the Duolingo platform. As part of the talk, Nicholas covered what Duolingo as well as some basics about the API available and then went over the details of his specific implementation, which included GitHub Actions to automate downloading data from Duolingo and Python to generate visual reports based on the downloaded data. The talk ended with a small demonstration of this custom tool.

GPT API Demonstration

The fourth talk of the night was given by Billy and was a short demostration of AI based APIs. This began with a basic overview of GPT 3.5, its API the cost model for using the API, and how it affected the over-all cost of the demo. Billy used ChatGTP and OpenAIWhisper to record and write a summary of his presentation as he gave it. At the end of the speech, the results of the API processing were shown to the audience.

DS Download Play

The next speaker of the night was Justin Figueroa, who talked about how the old Nintendo DS handled its game networking system. To give a proper background for the talk, Justin initially gave a background on the Nintendo DS, the state of networked gaming at the time, and why the DS features were revolutionary. Justin then went into details about how the game networking system worked, which protocol it used and also why it can no longer be used for networking these days.

The current state of VR

The last presentation of the night was given by Jeanie and was given on the topic of the current state of VR hardware. This talk went over the existing most used VR technology and covered the features and costs of each tier of products available on the market. In addition to specific products, Jeanie talked about various different technology options including VR Headsets, lens types, IR trackers, IMU trackers, full-body capture cameras, haptic suits, and VR treadmills. At the end of the talk, Jeanie also offered to give a demonstration of the hardware she brought to folks interested at the immediate after-event for the evening.