Week 13.428571 - Really last blog for Fall 2010 semester

Week 13.428571 - Last Blog for Fall 2010 semester.

We have the commit visualization here and Nate's whole commit visualization with legends is shown below:



Thanks to Tim, We have talk videos of the six presentations. Project details may be found in RCOS dashboard

1) First talk by Peter Hajas on Mobile Notifier



2) Second Talk by Colin Sullivan and Adam Georgiou on Concert



3) Third Talk by Joe Dougherty on Fire Department Management System.



4) Fourth Talk by Tom Rozanski and Tim McMullen on awesome-wav



5) Fifth Talk by Anthony Loven on supybotUI



6) Sixth Talk by John Lee (Thomas Alexander)on RPI WiFi For Android



Great Job Guys. Thanks Tim - His channel is http://www.youtube.com/user/hortont424

Happy Holidays - and Keep up the good work and Keep on contributing to FOSS.

Week 13.142856 December 2010 Photos Videos

Week 13.142856 December 2010

Thanks to Peter we have had visualization of git commits. That can be seen in
here Now Nate has created a combined visualization of project commits and it is shown below.


We had a great group of students to start with - That group continued to thrive and perform even better.


Mentors Photo is shown below. these mentors are awesome - They not only excel technically but also willing to help others.


Alex and John are graduating. They have done great things for RCOS. We are going to miss them. Here they are - sharp and witty as ever.



Thanks to all of you - we had a great semester

Week 13, Decemeber 10, 2010

Week 13, December 13, 2010

This past Friday was the last week of our meeting this semester. Most of Students working at RCOS contributed substantially to open source software projects. Students care so much about each other and care about FOSS efforts, they go out of their way to show their progress. Please see Projects git commits visualization (This was mainly the work of the student mentor Peter Hajas ). Thanks to Tim Horton who video taped the talks. He has placed the talks here.

We had six presentations.

1) Peter Hajas described his mobile notifier beta release (appropriately called awesome apple jacks. Peter has demoed his system and it really looked awesome. Hope other users will be able to download his Mobile notifier app and use it in their IPhones. Please see here for further details.

2) Colin Sullivan and Adam Georgiou presented their talks on their Concert Sound Organizer. They have completely reorganized their back-end using model view controller. Colin also talked about backnone.js - Their talk and other things are found here. They are using Django for their development. You should see their java commit visualization - It has been voted one among the best by his peers.

3) Joe Dougherty talked about his Fire Management Solutions. He has almost most of the system working. He has used Qt and C++ for his software development. His software has an eager customer. He also talked about his data management schema. His talk and blogs may be found here.

4) Tim and Tom presented their awesome-wav project - They have a beta release and a test for the users to test their security of wav implementations. Please see here for further details. Their software release version 1 is impressive.

5) Anthony Loven presented his supybotui - a web user interface for configuring IRC chat bot. He has done substantial implementation - He has not pushed his code yet. He plans to release his code and software during this winter break. His Blog here has his final presentation and other details.

6) John Lee (and Thomas Alexander) talked about RPI wifi for Android. They have added printer queue display in their latest implementation. Though he could not demo his system, it is easy to follow what this group has accomplished. This group even managed to incorporate my comments (to provide technical details) in their new presentation. Their talk can be found here.

What can I say more to this wonderful group of students. May be I should ask them to part the red sea and climb mount Everest and implement enhancements to linux kernel! They may do that and more. Great job guys. Mentors and I want you all to succeed and our efforts are aimed at that. Again thanks for all your efforts and continue to do good work!

Happy Holidays and promote FOSS efforts during this winter break too!

Week 12, December 3, 2010

Week 12, December 4, 2010

TGIF - for me these four letter have a different connotation - I look forward to Fridays so that I have a chance to interact with a vibrant, creative and enthusiastic group of students interested in Open Source Software efforts. I have to congratulate Nate (and Rob) for getting recognized for Ease at this blog post. At the penultimate week, the four groups of students gave final presentations of their projects. Thanks to Tim we have youtube videos of the presented talks.

1. Cihan Caglayan gave her update and final presentation on RCOS Sahana Eden for empowering local artisans. She has a design document for the three modules that will be essential for her system. She plans to complete the project during winter break. Here is a link to her blog post. Below is her presentation (in you tube)




2. John McMaster gave his final (really his last presentation as he is graduating a semester early) on UVNet Universal Decompiler. He has made substantial progress on GUI, Python API, streamlining unit tests, modularizing his code for plugins and he is writing a paper. John has awesome talents with reverse engineering and decompiling Please look at his blog for further details. RCOS (and in particular the current co-director) is going to miss the wisdom of John McM. John's talk may be found in this youtube.


3. Nate gave his final presentation on Ease. Nate has accomplished a great deal and Ease is gaining an active set of users. It goes without saying that Nate gave his presentation in Ease. The fact that Ease is translated into many languages is itself a testimony to his work. Nates blog gives further details. (You may also want to look at his code page.) Nate is still working to squash a few bugs and make further enhancements. Nate's talk may be found in this youtube link.


4. Alex and Joe gave their presentation on Touch of Math. As usual their presentation is awesome. Joe gave a demo of their system in a pc browser and IPhone (I have the audacity to ask for it to run in IPad - Naturally it will take them a few seconds to make it run in IPad). Their blog describes greater details. Joe's presentation may be found in this youtube video.


I sit and watch in jaw dropping amazement the level of participation and achievement A tip of my (invisible) hat to every one who presented these wonderful talks (and students who asked intelligent questions and suggestions) and to Tim Horton an unassuming student who took the videos. Based on this I can certainly predict that the future looks bright! As I finish typing this blog, I wish the outside world (at least people at RPI) appreciate the level of commitment and work of these young students.

Week 11, November 19, 2010

Week 11, November 19, 2010

The semester is slowly winding down. Aft these talks, we are more or less done with update talks of most of the groups. I am impressed with the tenacity of students in getting their projects to speed and in some cases to completion!.

This week we had update talks by Ben, Brendon and Lindsey, Nick and Ellis and Matt. Nate gave a fine presentation on his work on improving dashboard.

1) Ben Shippe has more or less completed his work on creating a server for displaying open street maps (similar to what JumpStart International does). He even had a live demo. It is extremely creditable to Ben as his server is a $60 second/third hand computer we got with very little RAM. This prevented him to cache the map tiles. He had also very little disk space to have the detailed map of the world. Ben jus showed the detailed map of UK. Ben has documented most of his porting stratgey so that his efforts could easily be documented.

2) Brendon and Linsey are moving along in their media content delivery systems. Lindsey is working on the backend data base issues where Brendon is concentrating on
the video display. They also showed a demo of their project. They are currently hosting their project in myrpi website (thanks Brian M and the rest of the Web Tech Group). They also showed off their vote and nominate social aspects of visualizing high end video. Very Good Progress by these two gentlemen.

3) Nick and Ellis have made a very good progress with their MYDoctor project. Their project started of with a goal to help single mothers (Nick and Ellis has nearly accomplished that goal) with a web site. They have extended their goals to help all patient and physicians. They are currently adapting open source software project (by some one else) in secure chatting/secure communication. Nick and Ellis showed a demo of their project and again it looks very good.

4) Matt is continuing with his open source software development efforts in the milkyway project (using BIONC). Matt's job is make the GPU work faster and reliably. Matt is doing a fantastic job of evaluating the various compiler/programming environments for various GPU. Since Milkyway is a big name project for RPI and tens of thousands of people are helping with their volunteer computing. So it is no wonder Matt is getting GPU units shipped to him overnight for their (GPU's) use in the project. Matt is testing them to utilize their computing potential.

True to the open source efforts, Nate is leading an effort to improve the dashboard. He is calling his system Observatory. Nate has already implemented some portion of it using Python, Django and JQuery. Nate is looking for volunteers to make more contributions to Observatory/Dashboard. Nate has posted his talk slides to the group.


What a pleasure for me to work such enthusiastic and creative students. I learn so much from them - their youth rubs on me - not only I become wiser, but also I feel younger!

Please check our dashboard for further details.

Week 10, November 12, 2010

Week 10, November 12, 2010

What an emotionally up and down week was last week - On Wednesday (11/10/2010), Poly (rpi student paper ) RCOS was featured in a news article ( see here for the actual article). That article had some positive things to say. On Thursday, Prof. Barbara Liskov of MIT(Turing Award Winner 2010) gave a talk on "Power of Abstraction". The talk rekindles my memories of my graduate student days (as I had been reading the papers (mentioned during the talk) and "partially" understanding the concepts). On Friday, Dr. Robert P. Ingalls an executive officer of RPI Cs department and teacher extraordinaire passed away. Dr. Ingalls was most helpful to RCOS and its mission and helped me greatly dealing with beauracracies. RCOS will miss Dr. Ingalls.

RCOS meeting went on as usual irrespective of the ups and downs. We had
four talks.

1) Steve talked about his Sahana Eden installation module updates to ease the installation process of Saha Eden. He has made the final enhancements and has submitted his code for review before getting accepted.

2) Liam talked about his update on secure skype like system. Liam has made the software consistent between client and server side. Liam has been using Protocol Buffer for his system. Liam is well on his way to make a substantial contribution to his system.

3) John and his group talked their update on Universal Batch Converter. They are making the GUI using Qt. The GUI is going on well. They showed even a brief demo. Since their system is a plug-in type, it can be easily extended to any kind of converters. This group is looking for Macs to test the portability of their system.

4) Finally Paul talked about his update on secure ripping. He divided his task into three parts 1) a command line tagger 2) a command line transcoding utility, and 3) a command line secure ripping. Paul has made a lot of progress with command line tagger and secure ripping. I wish he updates the dashboard properly (Some of Paul's updates are in here (based of firmant system of Rob Escriva developed as a RCOS project!) )

Then we split into smaller groups and mentors discussed with different project groups. We are still trying to get our mentor system to work well and we have been heading in that direction. Please give us/me a feedback.

I have to end this blog with a plea to update blogs and push your code.

Week 9, November 5, 2010

Week 9: November 5, 2010

With a new moon on Friday and many Indians were celebrating Diwali, the festival of lights, RCOS put on its own show of "fireworks" of talks. This week we had talks by four groups of students.

1) Graylin Kim hs been working on Open Legislation with NY State Senate dotCIO's office in their open quest for
open and transparent government. Graylin has been pursuing how to make this
efforts making legislatives public (and provide an API for searching and build a prototype)
available to other states. In this regards he is providing suggestive tags to bills
so that one can get information about the bills - like who proposed it who amended it, who voted for it, what stage of the process the bill is in etc). It is a fascinating work with deep implications on democracy. Graylin will be writing a blog about his implementations and his plan for the next stages.

2) Matt O'Brien has been working on management tools for Routers. His immediate client will be Networking Lab at RPI. Matt has been using PERL and Tk (GUI) to have multiple tabbed terminals (with automatic sign on). Matt has completed a basic GUI and a basic telnet session working. Matt plans to add bells and whistles to make his system useable before the end of this semester.

3) Joe Dougherty has been working with Volunteer Fire Management System. Joe has been using C++ with Qt. Joe has built the back-end of the program (using class structures preached in Software Engineering class).Joe is using SQLite for his back end data base. Many fire departments want to use his software. Joe's prelimiary gui design and implementation is given below.


4) John Lee and Tom Alexander presented a talk on making wifi (at RPI) work with Android. They provide a software solution.
They have releases this version in Android market place - They have also posted their code on the web. Both John and Tom have done an excellent job of making rpi wifi (hence any other university in principle) to work with android. Their next step may be to make their system even better and user friendlier.

Thanks to Alex (RCOS mentor) keeping time and gently enforcing it, the speakers finished right on time. For the last twenty minutes there were small group discussions with mentors floating between groups. The jury is still out whether breaking into small groups will help further foster FOSS ideas. I sincerely believe this will enable people to ask questions and learn from each other in a small personalized setting.

On Friday, our beloved dashboard looked more green than red (i.e. lots of students groups were updating wither their blogs or pushing the code)

Week 8, October 29, 2010

Week 8, October 29, 2010

I was away on Friday (10/29)at Wesleyan University (CT) to give a talk. At the same time I wanted our regular meetings to proceed as scheduled. Thanks to David Doria, a graduate student in ECSE department and an ardent advocate of FOSS, the talks went on as scheduled. This week the talks were held in DCC 308. Below is the meeting summary given by David. Again thanks much to him. I also want to than Tim Horton, Nate Stedman, John McMaster, Alex Radocea, Graylin Kim and David Doria for agreeing to be mentors this semester. All these people not only excel technically but also help and mentor others to excel in Open Source Software practice.
This weeks talks are by:

Ease by Nate and Robb

Nate has continued working on his light-weight presentation system, Ease. Particularly, he has been working on improving the packaging and install system. It now installs on the latest version of Ubuntu without the need to compile any of the depedencies from source!

Another neat aspect of the project is that it is becoming quite multilingual. Using the GNOME translation project, Nate has over 10 translations of Ease, including Chinese and Danish.

While working on the slide viewer/sorter, Nate discovered some issues with a GTK widget. He noted that GTK is in the middle of a major upgrade, so he will wait until GTK 3.0 is released to see if the problem has been resolved.

A great feature of the presentation was that the entire thing was
created with Ease, making it a presentation/live-demo in one!

Concert


Concert is a web-based an a system to allow people to upload audio tracks and then collaboratively tag portions of them. An example use is for a band to record a rehearsal and then remotely and collaboratively pick their best songs to compile in to an album.

The have written function in the style of file.convertToWav() so that the logic of determining the encoding of the file is hidden from the user.

Concert is written in Django, a framework for Python. Before the beginning of the semester they had a working version of Concert. The majority of the time this semester has been spent on two things: a code overhaul and the design of a new interface. The code has been
tremendously simplified by changing much of the code to use functions built-in to Django.

supybotUI

supybotUI is a web interface for an IRC bot. It is written in Flask, a light-weight Python framework (described as a "minimalistic version of Django). The idea is to be able to configure and monitor the bot without having to query the bot through the IRC channel. Since the last progress report, he has been working on new features (RSS feed
announcements, etc) as well as authentication. Once the authentication is secure, supybotUI will be deployed o the bot exRCOSist in the #RCOS channel on irc.freenode.net. He is hoping to get the UI finished in two weeks, at which point he will take and share screenshots.

Thanks to Anthony for posting the slides!

CAGE

CAGE is a gesture creattion/recognition system which can be used to trigger events on a computer or Android. The tag-line is "wristwatch + accelerometer = gestures!". The watch is made by TI and is only $50 (or $25 after a current rebate to encourage development of this type of device).

CAGE is written in JRuby. The packaging is awkward, so some time was spent getting it to work properly. Most of the time since the last update was spent on the Android app. Android devices have their own accelerometer, so the watch is not necessary.

The algorithm for matching an input/query gesture to the pre-recorded gesture database is based on the uWave algorithm (a variant of dynamic time warping).

A live demo was presented. It worked very well! Unfortunately due to a recent change by Apple's Java package, the gestures could not be used to drive anything during this demo, but that is an obvious extensions once the gesture is recognized, which was successfully demonstrated.


Awesome WAV

Awesome WAV is a system for hiding data in music. Unfortunately Tim was sick today, but Tom did a great job with the presentation even in his partners absence. There was some discussion about the security of the current algorithm. The short story is that if you simply XOR the data with a SAH1 hash, you can XOR the result with an unmodified
version of the song and extract the key! Alex and John had some suggestion on how to make it more secure. They will have a demo prepared for the next presentation where we can see the data and hear the audio, then hear the audio with the data embedded, then see the
data successfully extracted from the audio.

Week 7 October 22, 2010

Week 7: October 22,2010

This weekend was “RPI Family Weekend 2010”, so campus activities have been in full swing. We also had our Fall UPE/ACM/RCOS Programming Competition. We are grateful to Bloomberg, Vanguard, Facebook and Lockheed Martin for their generous support. Many current and past RCOS students participated in the competition.

This week progress presentations were given by:

1) Peter Hajas (Mobile Notifier)
Peter gave an excellent talk. His previous talk has been posted to Youtube! Peter's talk included a cool demo. Please read his blog for further details. The most important news is that Peter has released the alpha.1 version of Mobile Notifier. As Peter says, this is “way way better than other notifiers for IPhones!”

2) Brendon Ashby and Lindsey Kennard (Media Content Delivery System)
Brendon and Lindsey talked about various aspects of the High Definition Media Content Delivery System. A major part of their talk was a tutorial on High Definition content delivery . Lindsey is working on the database while as Brendon is working on developing an open source high definition media delivery (using existing systems). They have not blogged anything. Please update you blog with slides of your talk and update your code!

3) John McMaster (UVNet Universal Decompiler)
John is chipping away at his reverse engineering project, both the front end and the back end. On the back end, he is working on resolving function calls (this is a challenging problem with dynamic links). On the front end he is using Qt to display the content of large files effectively (this is also a challenging problem). I am confident that John will come up with ingenious methods to solve these problems.

4) Joe LaBarbera and Alex Radocea (Touch of Math)
Alex and Joe gave a thought provoking talk on their project, Touch of Math. They showed a cool demo on the web, as well as on a touch screen Android. They are mainly using Javascript technology. Alex and Joe’s system is able to manipulate simple arithmetic expressions and statements with +,-,*,/. They have a clear idea what their next tasks will be. They get a pat on the back for posting their code as well as keeping their blog up to date.


All students - please keep updating your blogs so that others can track the progress of your project (you can now spend less time on explaining the background and more time on what you are actually doing and how you are doing it). Please push your code earlier than later (“Release early, release often”). Please be sure to continue attending the weekly RCOS meetings. Please also participate and share your knowledge by reviewing other group’s projects. This is all what FOSS about!

Week 6, October 15, 2010

Week 6, October 15, 2010


Our campus was looking spiffy aided by fall colors and our usual meeting place was being used for the homecoming week-end. Never the less RCOS students are as enthusiastic as ever and we never want to miss our meeting. We held our meeting in Lally 102 instead. We are almost done with our first round of talks. My main request to the students is not to use their laptop when students are giving talks and to give some feedback to the speakers. Students do ask interesting and pointed questions. When one of the speakers complained that the students were talking during the talk, I felt bad. Please keep up the good work, pay a little bit more attention and be considerate. More importantly update your blogs (with presentations) and push your code.

This week we had presentations by

1) Matt O'Brien
2) Ellis Berner and Nicholas Steele
3) Zhenzheng Zhou and Josh Komoroske
4) Cihan Caglayan
5) Liam Bowen

Matt is working on Internet Management Program - He is developing GUI for a gnome terminal with many tabs (to interact with many different routers) - a useful utility for network engineers. He has tabbed version working with roxterm using perl scripts. His plan is to develop a GUI so that user does not have to enter the password in every terminal that is opened.

Ellis and Nicholas have generalized their project (from Beyond divorce) to Beyond doctor/life-coach. This project is an excellent social tool to help life
coaches and patients. Ellis and Nicholas are using CSS, HTML 5 and Java-Script technology. They have a preliminary website designed and it looked quite good. They are planning to work on the data base and some security issues. hough progress was apparent from the presentation, it would be helpful if they would keep a blog as well as post their code (their repository is empty). At the very least, the presentation slides could be posted on the blog.

Zhengzheng and Josh talked about their open book project. Their idea is to develop a p2p book sharing portal using a LAMP (Linux Apache MySql and PHP) stack. They seem to have a clear idea of what they are going to accomplish and they have learned the technology well. Their next phase is to implement the code and start testing. This group has not posted anything in their blog (they could at least post their presentations since they already prepared and presented their talks).

Cihan spoke about RCOS Sahana Eden (a HFOSS project). She has done a great job of posting her slides and findings in her blog. Cihan is interested in making Sahana useful for Fair-trade applications. She has been doing research in the Fair Trade organizations and their needs (she has blooged about it too!). Cihan is planning to develop/modify python modules to make this work.Sahana uses web2py which is not documented well and has a steep learning curve. Cihan is is taking the right approach by contacting developers at Sahana Eden and asking pertinent questions in the #sahana-eden chatroom.

Liam has an ambitious project of developing secure messaging system for linux systems. His system will be similar to Skype when finished. Liam is planning to implement the system in Java using Swing libraries. Liam has been doing a good job posting his code. However, his website and blog have not been working for weeks. He plans to fix his server and hence his website and blog very soon. He also needs to post his slides and blog more (actually, there are no posts as of yet!).

Overall RCOS is going very well this semester (You can check our dashboard for this.). My only complaint is that many students do not blog and push their code. Unless they do so,others will not be able to use their system. This collaborative development/feedback environment is one of the very reasons for the existence of this open source software center! When others look at your code, they will provide invaluable feedback and comments which will help to improve your skills and techniques.

Week 5, October 8, 2010

Week 5, October 8, 2010

Despite the beginning of a three day week end, our meeting on Friday (October 8) was well attended. Not only that all of our students stayed late till all the five talks were over.

We had talks by

1) Paul Ignatenko
2) Matt Arsenault
3) Joe Dougherty
4) John Dickinson, Mike Casper, Jon Kriss, Alex Hunt, Alex Chaldyshev
and Frank Kotarski
5) Corey McClymonds


Paul's transcode (as per his project page)is a comprehensive utility for secure ripping and audio transcoding at all user level. Hope he updates his blog indicating his progress. He seems to have made a good initial progress based on his presentation.

Matt talked about his summer and continuing work on Milkyway at home. This is a distributed computing project (using BOINC) between Physics and Computer Science Departments. Matt is continuing to work on this as a 4 credit project. Matt has not progressed with his RCOS project on Gobject introspection Haskell bindings generator. If Matt can carve out a segment in Milkyway Project, he could make that as his RCOS project.

Joe is continuing his Fire department Management System. He has implemented back end of his system (using C++ and SQLite). Joe is planning to use Qt to produce a GUI. Joe has already lined a few Fire Departments to use his system. Joe has plans to release his software by the end of this semester.

Jhonny's group working on Universal Batch Converter posts on their blog: Work goes on under the hood with core code, we have an abstraction framework for code execution so that running programs is platform independent and uses the C++ STL. As a result 40 line test files can convert files, and have been used to convert vorbis and flac for my iPod. There is a lot of code building out the converter abstraction, that will hopefully soon be complete enough to build test code with. This group seems to have overcome the law of large number of people working in a group. Hope they continue their momentum and make substantial progress.

Corey is working on Genesis simulator - His software is like other existing software open source but written all in C (as against assembler code). Genesis is a fast Sega Genesis emulator, able to run most games at full speed. It also has lots of features and can play most Sega Genesis games without problems. Corey is also planning to include a graphics emulator too. Hope Corey updates his blog and code pages.

All the talks are wonderful. The only major drawback is lack of updates in their blogs (Other than universal batch converter). This is particularly hard if one wants to look back and read what these groups of students have accomplished (they have certainly accomplished )

Week 4 October 1, 2010 Students' presentations

Week 4 October 1, 2010

RPI's annual fall career fair (by NSBE/SHPE) was held this weekend. This meant a lot of alumni and other company recruiters visited our campus. Many of them were interested in talking to students doing projects with RCOS.

We had a guest speaker Mr. Steve Dale from IBM Austin. He is a manager of Extreme Blue Division at Austin. He talked about the open source efforts in IBM and intern opportunities for students. Even though students work for three months, many of them are able to provide patches to open source software projects. In particular he mentioned about file system cache patch that interns were able to accomplish.

In addition to our guest speaker, we had our regular students speakers. They are

1) Anthony Loven

2) Ben Shippee

3) Steve Trombetti

Anthony Loven has been diligently working on a bot for the chatroom. This bot currently works in #rcos channel in irc://irc.freedom.net - Anthony's project is to provide a web interface to the bot. Anthony has given a detailed road map for his project. His presentation may be found here.

Ben Shippee is continuing with his providing a backup server for Jump start international for Open Street Maps. He has installed a working version and documented all of the details to make the server working. Ben is trying to cope up with he storage requirements and to complete installing one last missing component (which lacked documentation). This project will be an extremely useful project who want to use Open Street Maps.

Steve is continuing his work with his project of installation of Sahana Eden (a HFOSS project) for system administrators who use Sahana-Eden (An emergency management system -currently installed to help flood victims in Pakistan). Though he completed this project in summer (along James McMillan), he created a stand alone system to configure Sahana-Eden. This semester he wants to integrate the configuration system in the main system itself. Once he completes that, Steve will take a project that involves a GIS (Geographical Information Systems) module to Sahana Eden.

These and other projects are going well considering the fact we are in the middle of an onslaught of tests, projects, homework.

Week 3 September 24, 2010

Week 3 September 24 2010

Our Fall RCOS group is going in full swing. All the students are active, vocal and interested in contributing to Open Source Community. I am fortunate to witness the energy and am glad some of their vibrant energy gets transferred to me. I wish other faculty members participate in RCOS, contribute and learn.

Here is a picture of the attentive students listening to a talk.



We had talks by

1) Nate Stedman and Rob Carr

2) Colin Sullivan, Adam Georgiou, Josh Elser (Alumni), Mike Pinkowish (co-op) and Chris Butler

3) Peter Hajas

4) Tim McMullan and Tom Rozanski

5) Michael O'Keefe

All the talks are jaw dropping and wonderfully presented. How else can you explain undergraduate students hanging on a Friday afternoon past 5:00 pm listening to talks!

Nate and Rob are continuing with their work on Ease - Presentation software for Gnome. They are planning to release version 0.4 soon. Nate and Rob are planning to include many plugins to Ease (some of the audience suggestions include plug in to direct twitter feed, plugin to latex to write scientific and technical presentations)

Colin, Adam and Chris presented their concert Sound Organizer useful for a local band members to collaborate and discuss songs. They have a prototype working already. They are doing bug fixes and are planning on utilizing emerging technologies (such as HTML5 and SVG). Their system is awesome and will be useful to musicians who would like to collaborate. Their talk slides may be found by clicking here.

Peter, being an apple fan, is working on a non-obtrusive mechanism for IPhone notification. His presentation was awesome (like every one else this week). Peter knows people who worked on similar systems before. Peter has made a preliminary implementation of his system and a Photoshop of his GUI. A RCOS member suggested Peter to make some of his functions (to create Mobile Notification Application) in a open source library - to enable others to create some other other applications.

Tim and Tom are continuing with their Awesome wave project. Their project is to a part of a stenography project (to code data in a music file without losing the sound quality of the music). Tim and Tom have created a prototype already. They are planning to package, fix the bugs, try with other music file formats and different compression schemes for the data.

Mike is continuing with his CAGE( chronos) project. His project is to create gestures and control using gestures some of the computer applications (including him to move presentation slides by gesture etc - As Eric, an earlier project member aptly mentioned that this project is a minority report style for common men) Mike will package CAGE system for TI wrist watch. His next task is to make his system work with Androids and release it to the market. He is also planning to make CAGe work with Windows. My dream of doing air math may be realized with his android application (at least that is my thinking).

Please look at the dashboard (http://dashboard.rcos.cs.rpi.edu ) to learn more details about their projects. As usual I learned a great deal after listening to these talks.

week 2.5 Wednesday 22, 2010

I want to share the RCOS group photo taken last week. You can see a fine group of eager and energetic students waiting to write open source code to do useful things.

Week 2 September 17, 2010

Week 2 September 17, 2010

Most of the students have chosen their projects and have started making headway into their projects. We had four talks this week - three by students and we had a guest speaker from dotCIO office Will Gill (Will has worked on RCOS projects during past semesters).

We had presentations by
1) John McMaster
2) Will Gill
3) Alex Radocea
4) Graylin Kim

John Mcmaster's project is universal de-compiler by force - John is continuing his work on open source tools for reverse engineering. In particular he wants to pursue scanning for licenses in source code - John has learnt enough Qt to create a GUI front end for his decompiler - He hopes that having a gui will add more usability to his system. His talk slides may be found in



Will Gill talked about geo cordinates features of HTML 5. Will has building a lot of web applications for dotCIO office. One of the applications he is building is to show points of interest close to where one is. Will had a nice demo with IPad which showed wikipedia articles close to JEC building. Will will post some of his sample code on the web for others to look at.

Alex talked about his touch math (interactive) project. His project is manipulate math equations on the fly and get results. To illustrate if you want to expand(x+y) ² all you need is to pull this apart - what one does with IPhone/Android for expanding icons. Alex's ideas are very cool and can be an excellent tool set for Scientists. His talk may be found here.

Digiti - MultiTouch Equation Editor - The Concept on Prezi

Graylin Kim talked about his work with Open Legislation and NY State Open Government Project. In his past work, he has provided API and search capabilities. Now he wants his system to be used by other state governments. Graylin's work and others work will form a stepping stone for democracy - transparency of government and bring power to ordinary citizens.
His talk may be found here.

Rcos fall 2010

View more presentations from GraylinKim.

It was an enjoyable and educative experience for me as usual - I learned a lot. Students at RCOS are motivated and dedicated to make their project a success.

Please update the dashboard if you have not already done so.

Week 1 Sptember 10, 2010

We have an enthusiastic and bright students on our first meeting for the fall semester in JEC 3117. We have had a few new faces and glad to have a few returning veterans. Most of the students have chosen their projects - some are their own, some are continuing with their projects, some are choosing to work on HFOSS, some on Open Government and soem to help with local community.

As usual, my plea is to request the students to update the dashboard (right only two projects are on line).

We had two guest speakers the first week:

1) David Dora
2) Alex Rodacea

David is a graduate student at ECSE department (he got his BS from RPI) and he talked about open content. His pleas is to contribute to Open Book project (specifically 50 to 60 pages book) with explicit idea, outline, details and examples. His talks slides may be found here.



Alex's general theme was reverse engineering. In particular, Alex talked about his summer exploits (with his two team members (one from Germany and one from Korea)) winning $10000 in a Security Contetsts conducted in connection with a security conference in Montreal Canada in 2010. Alex gave an over all summary of his his exploits and he had a few specific slides. He talked about the two common security holes in Software (namely comparison with signed numbers and with initialized variables). He gave clever examples of these kinds of mistakes and how people exploit these.

Alex is willing to chat with anyone about these problems. His slides may be found here.
Alex's slides

Week 1(2).6180339887 (8/20/2010)

Week 1(2).6180339887 (8/20/2010)

It was indeed a golden (ratio) week with an unconference of NY State Government Open Source efforts held at the Legislative building at Albany, NY. With an enlightened NY State senate CIO, NY state government has been going full steam with their open source efforts. Like whitehouse , the ny state senate is going the open source drupal (version 6) way (with web 2.0 technology). NY State legislative offices provide open API to get to the legislative data. All the conferences were streamed live and archived. Please visit this site to get more information (if you are interested in getting involved).

The NY State CIO is all for open source software efforts. You can watch him in this youtube video. One of the leading tech employees at the CIO office is a RPI alumni and hence provides greater opportunity for RCOS students involvement.

One of the summer 2010 RCOS students, Graylin Kim worked with NY State CIO office to get some of these efforts moving forward. In fact he was mentioned as a super intern!

This link gives the detailed program of the barconference.

During the first day there was a developers workshop where people talked about the current projects and what they have accomplished. You can see in this photo Graylin giving his talk.



I learned a lot from attending these talks (remotely) through live streaming.

On Friday, I attended the unconference (or barconference) - We had key note talks by NY State CIOS (Andrew Hoppin, Dr. Melodie Strawberry-Stewart, Rico Singleton) as well as an enlightening talk by a grass root manager Philip Ashlock.

This was followed by various small discussion groups:
I attended their drupal efforts, what should be in the IT policy of the next governor, NYState thruway system and open video. I learned a lot of things from these talks. Accessibility of web and accessibility of data were discussed at length.

The following were some of the useful links that I could jot down.

State thruway (traffic, transit)

CIO OFT

openplans

percentmobile

drupalgardens

open 311

open 511Municipality

On a lighter vein I can put a tick mark to a column saying that I too attended a bar conference!

All in all it was a worthwhile event and very useful too!

Week 12 - Final Day of the Final Presentations

Week 12: (8/13/2010)

One of the cool things for me to be associated with RCOS (http://rcos.rpi.edu ), is the helpful attitude of many people (students, fellow faculty members and staff members). As I was recovering from a bad case of cold, I could not attend our last meeting. Two outstanding people one student (Brian Michalski) and one faculty member (Dr. Robert Ingalls) came to my rescue. Both of them are superb in not only on technical things that they do, but also know how to manage and how to help in a gentle manner. I am extremely thankful to both of them.

I will be remiss if I do not acknowledge the excellent work of summer 2010 RCOS students. They rose to the challenge and did an outstanding work.

This week, we had talks by

1) Graylin Kim
2) Matthew O'Brien
3) Anthony Loven and Brittany Jason
4) Sean Austin, Diana Mazzola and Griffin Milsap
5) Jacob Katz

Jason Zallinger could not attend. His talk may be found in
Final talk (powerpoint with audio)

Joe Dougherty could not attend. He is making pitch for his system to various fire departments. He promises to be present during our Fall Poster presentation.

Brian Michalski has given a succinct summary of the talks in his blog. Thanks Brian.

Thanks to Rob Escriva for creating IRC for RCOS - That provided a fertile ground for speedy technical exchanges. Thanks to Eric Allen for keeping our dashboard alive and thriving from California!

Hoping to see many of you for the Fall RCOS projects! Keep coding and producing excellent open source software.

Week 11 - More Cool Presentations

Week 11: (8/6/2010)

Time flies when you are working with a fine group of young and energetic student with creative ideas. The summer is almost over (next week will be our last week).

We had presentations by


1) Nicholas Steele
2) Stephen Trombelli and James McMillan
3) Ryan Dignard
4) Ryan Baltazar and Ben Shippe
5) Michael O'Keefe,

Nick had made very good progress with his vote box project. He completed his ballot (with Qt) and most of the back end and GUI software. He plans to build a hardware prototype for his project next and hopefully our next RPI union election may utilize his hardware and software.

Steve and James talked about their Sahana-Eden project (part of HFOSS project). They have completed the system installation software. They are getting feedback from system administrators and incorporating their suggestions in their system. Next step is to get more testing and launching their with the next release.

Ryan D has almost completed his donor database system. He has added anonymous contribution in his system (thanks to the suggestion of fellow RCOS students during his previous presentation). He needs to do more testing. He is also trying to see whether his software could be done under the WAX PHP framework of Joe Ch (done last year as a RCOS project).

Ryan B and Ben has almost completed their installation of map server The time consuming portion of their sever is the tile generation of maps. They showed a quick demo of their server. they are documenting the installation instruction, creating a wiki etc. They hope to finish this before the end of this summer.

Mike gave a very cool presentation of this gesture creation/recognition software with his watch. His software runs on apple hardware and Mike is trying to make it work under other operating systems. Mike is also planning to release a library package for his gesture recognition/creation software.

All in all, the talks and the projects are very interesting. I do hope that others at RPI and elsewhere notice our efforts in making this world a better place.

Week 10 - Final Presentations Begin

Week 10: (7/30/2010)

We have exciting three weeks coming now (starting this week) where the students (and their groups) present their finished (or almost finished) work. Distinct from our regular meetings, this Friday, Steve and James presented their Sahana Eden work (for HFOSS http://hfoss.org ) at Wesleyan University (through dimdim a web presentation tool). They have done a very nice administrator's utility for installing Sahana Eden (Python version of Sahana - http://sahanafoundation.org/ ) James and Steve also also listened to the other presentations and increased their awareness of HFOSS work (and contributing to that work). This was a nice co-ordinated effort by RPI, Wesleyan, Oregon State, Connecticut College, Mount Holyoke, Bergen Community College and Trinity College. Please see this link for details of the various sessions.

Our regular Friday meeting consisted of the following three groups:

1) Luke Perkins
2) Brian Michalski
3) nate Steadman and Rob Carr

Luke has completed what he has promised to deliver - BWAPI (Broodwar API for AI gaming community). He has released his latest version. It had 30 odd downloads in three days and his software is used by 1000's of people. If you do not believe me, please look at this site. One has to look at this forum to see his programs impact!

Brian has done a substantial work for his Flagship Geo project. More importantly he has built a framework that could be used for many different applications besides Flagship. His (future) applications include RPI Shuttle Tracking (with dynamic route specification), Troy Crime reporting and tracking (by the community) and concerto. Brain's demo illustrates his program's capabilities nicely.

Nate and Rob have combined their talents and efforts to make the presentation software (for Gnome) to be Ease. Nate gave a demonstration of Ease's presentation. The capabilities are awesome. Move over Open Office and Avatar. Ease could be 3 D presentation software. The entire software is written in Vala with a number of libraries- Nate has also assume the role of mentorship for a GSOC student. Nate is planning to release Ease version 0.2 or 0.3 soon. Rob's exprtise with Seed is further helping this project.

Please look at our dashboard for further details.

A fantastic start to the final presentations.

Week 9 : More Update Talks

Week 9: (7/23/2010)

With this week, we have concluded the update talks by all the student groups. We had talks by the following students


1) Jason Zallinger
2) Matthew O'Brien
3) Jacob Katz
4) Anthony Loven and Brittany Jason
5) Joseph Dougherty

Jason is in the process of evaluating his gmail adventures game. A group of student volunteers is evaluating the game and answering Jason's well chosen questionnaire. Jason showed us the glimpse of one such response. Jason is trying to hypothesize the narrative nature of gmail archives.


Matthew is building his local community website. He has been using PHP for his framework. Matthew has been learning a lot of new things, assimilating them and incorporating in his project. He showed us a demo of his project during his talk. With the current pace, I am hopeful that he will be able to complete his project before the end of this summer.

Jacob is working on his teaching chess to elementary school children, Jacob has completed coding (in C++ )and testing most of his engine. His remaining task is to implement a GUI, more testing, opening libraries and end game features. Jacob plans to test his development with an elementary school in Southern California.

Anthony and Brittany have made a considerable progress with their IntuiTask for Androids (of making calendars and agenda lists). They have implemented a fancier recursive task lists. They are yet to load and save the lists. (they are exploring the data base options and using the existing calendar formats). They are exploring the adaptability of Appinventors. Their presentation can found here.


Joe D has made quite a progress with his firehouse management system. Joe is using SQLite for his backend. He is using C++ and Qt for his work. Joe D is doing a micro blog. After discussing with Rob about licensing issues, Joe D is planning to push his code.

The update talks have been wonderful. Please look at our dashboard to get more details.

I am looking forward to hearing the final presentations in the coming three weeks.

Week 8: Activities Galore

Week 8: (7/16/2010)

Like last week, we had talks both on Wednesday and Friday. On Wednesday we had students present their progress with their projects. We had talks by

1) Nicholas Steele
2) Sean Austin and Griffin Milsap,
3) Ryan Baltazar
4) Ryan Dignard

Nick is progressing along with his vote box. He has made the ballots and his user interface is coming along. He is trying to build a device that is easily accessible to people with disabilities.

Sean and Griffin have made design changes to their droidViz project. They are planning to create a visualization libraries (efficient and powerful). They are currently repackaging their code. Their previous code has been downloaded 3000 times.

RyanB talked about map-server project with JumpStart international. Most of the pieces are in place in his trial server. He has a new hardware (thanks to the generosity of Moorthy and Rob ), where he is installing the server, and documenting his efforts. He is also planning to write shell scripts to make this installation easier for other people.

RyanD talked about his Database for donors for NGO's based on CanKid project. He has been making excellent progress. He is currently working on the look and feel of the browser where the donors make donations.

On Friday (7/16), we had two visitors (Prof. Ralph Morelli and Trishan deLanerolle) from Trinity college in Hartford. They talked about their work on Humanitarian FOSS (HFOSS) efforts. They have a NSF grant and they have done phenomenal things building community, educating people, and students doing excellent projects of community/social value. In particular they talked about Sahana (Disaster Emergency Management System), Collabit (Collabbit aims to facilitate inter- and intra-committee communication in case of a disaster or other event that requires coordination between multiple organizations or individual users) and POSIT (tracking with android and building ad hoc networks). It was a fascinating talk aided by lots of multimedia presentation.

Two students from RCOS are working on HFOSS project this summer. Steve presented his and James's work on making Sahana Eden (Python version of Sahana)easily installable. Steve and James has almost completed the project. they are now doing the suggestions from the feedback they received from Fran (the main developer of Sahana Eden). Steve and James are planning to develop an additional module (GIS) for Sahana Eden.

Thanks to everyone for their great work.

Week 7 Progress like July 4th Fireworks!

Week 7: (7/9/2010)

This week (soon after July 4th weekend) was a hectic week - The amount of activity might rival July 4th fireworks!

On Wednesday, we had four students present update talks (these are second round talks). We had talks by

1) Andrew Zonenberg (Guest Speaker - works with Prof Roysam's group)
2) Michael O'Keefe
3) Graylin Kim
4) Ben Shippee


Andrew talked about his open source achievements with GPU accelerated signal processing Library. He has implemented 1 d, 2d, and 3d convolution algorithms with GPU (he currently uses CUDA - with an effort to port to open CL) He has achieved fantastic speed ups and he had an excellent presentation. His presentation may be found here.

Mike has been making a steady progress with his chronos (Watch operating system). He also wants to use the gesturing software with android. His progress is remarkable despite minor setbacks.

Graylin is making a nice progress with making the data from NY State Legislation Site more accessible with his python library API. Graylin has been refactoring his code and making it more compact. More importantly he is interacting closely with the people who are involved with open data.

Ben has also done fair amount of work on the command line version of his Open Math Game. Ben knows what is left to be completed and he is making every effort to complete it.

Great Job Andrew, Mike, Graylin and Ben.

On Friday (7/9), we had a guest speaker Dr. Luis Ibanez (from kitware) talking about "Educating the Next Generation of FOSS Developers". Luis gave a captivating talk on the issues involved with just using proprietary software. His talk touched economy, copyright, patents, licences, case studies, business models, software process, open access publishing and peer production. He could relate these topics from his experiences in teaching at RPI and as a lead developer of ITK.

His talk may be found here

I learned a lot of things this week (despite we had very hot spell and try to put a damper in my (brain) activities)

Week 6: Second Presentations Begin

Week 6: (7/2/2010)

The second set of presentations (update of the students' projects) began this week.

We had three speakers.

1) Luke Perkins

2) Brian Michalski

3) Nate Stedman

Luke is going strong with his BWAPI (Brood War API). He is writing a lot of unit tests and he is updating his blog/code very regularly. Luke is consistently number one in our dashboard. Luke's code has been downloaded by 1000's of people and we are hoping for greater things from Luke.

Brian has made good progress with his Flagship Geo. He is also writing unit tests for the code he has written. Brian's framework is extensible and he wants to provide api to Shuttle tracking project, crime reporting projects etc. Brian also talked about Concerto 2 - They are redesigning to make plug in architecture. Concerto has already had 10,000 downloads. CERN is using Concerto with LHC (Large Hadron Collider) project announcements. RPI announced that they are going to use Concerto for their RPIAlert Systems!

Nate is progressing with his Ease Presentation software. Nate and his team had already made efforts for i18n. (translated into 4 more languages) Nate's demo is awesome. Video plugin works (almost). Again a fantastic job is done by Nate both in his implementation and presentation.

All in all, if we use these three presentations as samples for updates of projects, RCOS is in an excellent shape this summer!

Week 5: Student Presentations

Week 5: (6/25/2010)

We are in the fifth week of summer and all the students are done with making their first set of presentations. During this first set of presentations, all the students have outlined their problems, motivation, importance, clients and time lines of their projects.

We had talks by

1) Ryan Baltazar
2) Matthew O'Brien
3) Jacob Katz
4) Anthony Loven and Brittany Jason
5) Joseph Dougherty

Ryan and Ben are working to get a OSM Tile Server On The Road - Not only they are getting one, they are also documenting their efforts. Many of the pieces of OSM (Open Street Map) tile server are not documented - so Ryan and Ben are doing their best to get the software running.

Matthew's talk on Project Community Connected generated a lot of discussions - The questions ranged from how his system is different from the existing open source, security, IP filtering (about who can psot in the community) etc. Matt defended all the questions reasonably well. Matt has a time line and a prototype implementation almost ready. Matt will add additional features such as RSS feeds, mash up with maps once he gets his website running. Matt usses PHP, HTML 5, CSS, JQuery and Javascript.

Jacob is working on OpenGambit an education program to teach chess to young children(for windows XP (32 bit) architecture). Jacob had written as much code as he has deleted . He is writing his system in C++ and will have a GUI to go along with his back-end. Jacob has also written substantial code (he even demonstrated a command line version!) and a time line for his project.

Anthony and Jason are developing a calendar like system (agenda management system) for Androids. They have placed their first talk online already! They have a lot of cool features - Hope they get to work on things that distinguish their applications from the rest. They have a time line too.

Finally Joe D is working on a fire Department Management system to help with Fire Departments. Joe's earlier version software have been used by his town's fire department - That was written in Visual Basic. His current system uses C++, Qt (for GUI) and SQL-lite for Database . Joe D is confident that he will be able to finish most of the implementation by the end of July.

Now we are on to the next round of talks - Looking forward to hearing great(er) things!

Week 4: Student Presentations

Week 4: (6/18/2010)

We are continuing with the (first) presentations by students. This week, we had less number of students attending the meeting this week (Hope this is a minor anomaly!)
We had talks by

1) Jason Zallinger
2) Sean Austin, Diana Mazzola and Griffin Milsap
3) Ben Shippee
4) Stephen Trombelli and James McMillan
5) Ryan Dignard

Jason talked about his research agenda to get a narrative story from gmail archives. The preliminary implementations are done and Jason is in the process of collecting data and writing research paper.

Sean, Diana and Griffin are continuing their work android visualization with open GL. They have a schedule to include Shaders and demo to show the power of their open source visualization for android.

Ben talked about his open Math game - a game developed for educational purposes - Ben and Ryan have started their core implementation (at least text based) and are on track for doing a release of their game toward beginning of August.

Stephen and James are working on HFOSS project on Sahana. They are working from a large code base - and they are in touch with the developer from across the world. They are developing some features for the python version of Sahana (Sahana Eden) - They have picked up momentum.

Ryan is working on Donor Data Base in PHP. He has a schedule for the rest of the summer.

Please check out our dashboard and blog aggregates for details.

I am hoping most of these projects will be successful making every one happy.

Week 3 - Going Strong!

Week 3: (6/11/2010)

Thanks to Ryan B, a group photo was taken last Friday (6/11). From the smiling faces you can see that the students are enjoying their work.



First presentations are going in full swing.

This week the presenters were
1) Nate Stedman
2) Glaylin Kim
3) Michael O'Keefe
4) Nicholas Steele
5) Rob Carr

Their presentations seemed more like update talks rather than their first talks. Naturally all of them have been working on their RCOS projects since last year (Nicholas inherited the Votebox project from Joe D).

Nate and Rob are doing two different presentation software fro Gnome. Both of them are quite nice. Nate has a neat demo working. Rob's software has been featured LWN site.

Graylin has been making a very nice progress with open legislation software. His plan if providing a library is excellent and he has made very good progress with it.

Michael has provided a nice time line for "watch" software project. Michael has again made a good initial breakthrough.

Nicholas has been making progress with Qt for GUI for the Votebox project. He has also time line for his project.

All in all the students are making great progress You should check our dashboard to get greater details- Hoping to see great talks next week too.

Week 2 - First Presentations Begin

Week 2: (6/4/2010)

We are glad to report that RCOS has become a charter member of HFOSS Please check our RPI's HFOSS site http://hfoss.rpi.edu and this site has been linked to the chapters link. We are starting in a small fashion (Steve and James are working on HFOSS project - James just finished his freshmen year in 2010 and Steve transferred to CS in 2010) and hopefully grow bigger as years roll by and funds start to come in. If you want to get involved in this activity please let me know. Also RyanB and Ben (both just finished their freshmen years at RPI in 2010) are working with Junpstart international on a mapping server project. We are fortunate to have young and vibrant minds interested in Open Source Software.

This week we had two talks by

1) Brian Michalski

2) Luke Perkins

Nate is working on FlagshipGeo - extending his expertise on the development of Flagship - a document tool used in RPI students' union. Brain and his web tech group had developed Flagship to make the students' government transparent. Brain gave a talk last Spring. He is planning to add open source GIS information to this tool. This project looks very interesting. You should look at his blog http://geo.brispace.net/ He plans to use Ruby on Rails 3, HTML 5 . At least his libraries will be useful to a number of people. Brian has presented a nice plan of action for this summer to carry out his project.

Luke is diligently working on providing Broodwar API for Starcraft games. His interest is n Artificial intelligence, terrain maps, and machine learning. He has picked a nice application to contribute. Luke has been well known in this application. His contribution has already been downloaded and used by a number of people. At least one RCOS group showed an interest in using his software for their project. He has already blogged about his first presentation here. Luke has outline what he is going to work during this summer. I am looking forward to his great contribution.

Graduation Week and First Week of Summer 2010

Week 1 : (5/28/2010)

We had our meeting on Friday (5/28/2010) at noon in our usual place JEC 3117. Many students working on RCOS had taken a well earned break after the classes and exam. We have an enthusiastic bunch of students (some old timers and few new faces including 4 or so rising Sophomore students). It is also great to have them use the dashboard already. There are already 17 contributors. Hope we have a repeat performance (like Spring 21010) of the students' performance and achievements.

This week we had two speakers.
1) Mukkai S. Krishnamoorthy
2) Roberst Escriva.


I talked about forming community, sharing codes and knowledge. More importantly it is perfectly a valid thing to request for help. My slides can be found here.



As usual Rob's talk is articulate and gave lots of useful links. More improtantly he has created an IRC channel for rcos in freenode irc://irc.freenode.net
and there is channel called rcos. Please visit there and hang around for sharing information.

Rob will post his slides soon to the group.

Nate is mentoring a GSOC intern this summer (Summer 2010) on his past RCOS project.

On Saturday (5/29/2010), RPI had his graduation and many of the past RCOS alumni graduated. Even though I am sad that I will have less interaction with them, I am terribly happy for their past accomplishments and future contributions.

Congratulations to all seniors.

Summer Faculty Workshop at Trinity College (HFOSS)

Week -1: (5/18/2010-5/20/2010)

I seized on a great opportunity to attend a summer faculty workshop sponsored by hfoss at Trinity College, Hartford, CT. HFOSS (Humanitarian Free and Open Source Software) efforts at Trinity College, Wesleyan University and Connecticut College have been funded by NSF under the direction of Prof. Ralph Morelli (Trinity College and the main organizer) Here is a link to that website. Details of the workshop can be found here.There were eighteen attendees coming near and far (as far away as Hawaii and Oregon!).

Here is a nice group photo of the participants.




This was a hands on workshop - The instructors taught us some things and some of the participants taught us some more. Because the workshop was on Humanitarian as well as free and open source software, the comradeship was very high.

You can see some of us working/struggling with one of the exercises in this photo.



The Tuesday morning session covered basic free and open source materials. Then there were talks that are Humanitarian specific efforts.

Three such topics were:
1) Sahana foundation an open source disaster management system. Developers are based all over the world.

2) Open MRS - Open Source Patient monitoring health care systems. Main center is Partners in health in Boston.

3) Android/Posit/ODK - Based in Washington University Seattle.

I participated in the Sahana group. Even though we were unable to play with the code base, we saw a demo by Trishan (of Trinity College). We were also fortunate have the CEO of Sahana Foundation come and explain some of the things. The highlight may be to have a dimdum and skype session with one of the python developers of Sahana (based at Thailand). I truly learned the global nature of this project and its impact on millions of people. The working group notes can be found here.

The participants were also given opportunity to talk about their respective open source education initiatives at their institutes. Tim from Oregon State University, Norman from Wesleyan, Ralph from trinity, Martha from Hawaii and I gave brief presentations.

A snap of my presentation:



The breakfast, lunch, dinner, coffee breaks were all excellent. Lots of thanks to Ralph and Trishan who spearheaded the efforts ably assisted by their colleagues in Wesleyan and Connecticut College and students from Trinity College.

Thundering Finale' - Poster Presentation Spring 2010

Week 14: (5/7/2010)
A fabulous way to end a fantastic semester by having a poster session at the DCC Great Hall for Rensselaer Community. We had a near perfect attendance with a poster display from all but one group. This is remarkable considering the end of the semester load (with exams, projects, presentations to classes) to all the students.

Tim Horton took a lot of photos. Not only that, he uploaded them immediately. Here is the complete list of photos.

A lot of students, faculty members came and saw the fantastic work of the students. Here is a photo of Dave Hollinger looking at the poster and as usual asking probing questions!



Here is a snapshot of the poster session.




We had the advantage of the collective wisdom of a wonderful group of seniors. Here is the cheerful group photo of the smiling seniors.


Special thanks to mentors Eric, Rob, Josh and Devin. They helped me in so many ways - providing constructive suggestions, supporting and helping the students, maintaining, developing software and hardware. Also thanks to Allen for helping me with Android questions - day or night!

Here is our group photo taken after eating our staple food - Pizza!



Thanks to Prabhat, Kim, Badri and Laraine for doing behinds the scenes work.

A big thanks to Mr. Sean O'Sullivan for making this center happen.

I will end this with a photo of the photographer Tim and his gnome group (known as Gnome - Gurus!)




Thanks all - I had a fantastic time this Spring learning from you all!

SoftwarePractices (2)

Robert Margolies (margor@rpi.edu) , Christopher Brown(brownc7@rpi.edu)                      2

Best Practices to Succeed in a Software Project and Pitfalls of Failure

Introduction

              At the start of any software project, it is common for issues regarding project management to be overlooked. Generally, people are more concerned with the technical implementation of the project and do not think in the long term. It is very important from the very beginning to set forth a good schedule to keep a project on task and not let it fall behind schedule.

              In groups that are facilitated by RCOS, there is no appointed leader of a group. Roles are not assigned, they are usually taken or volunteered for by members of the group. This creates a potential problem because if no one steps into the role of project manager, it is possible for the project to fail to meet deadlines and goals.

              Successful project management involves delivering the right product at the right time. The following will describe the different phases of project management along with how it relates to RCOS.

Initiation Phase

              Initiation of the project occurs at the beginning of the project. After the proposal has been accepted by RCOS, the group should organize their first meeting. In the first meeting, guidelines should be set that all members of the group will abide by. In many cases, a standing meeting time can be setup to ensure face to face communication each week.

              It is also important to begin to discuss the scope of the project including goals, requirements, and deadlines.

Planning and Design Phase

              After the initiation phase where the scope of the project and goals are decided, the group should enter a phase of planning and design. In this phase, a high level design should be created along with a planned method to accomplish this design.

              This plan should include a schedule that identifies deliverables for each member along with due dates. If a project manager role has been created, this person should drive these deliverables to fruition. If no project manager has stepped up, it is the responsibility of each member of the group to complete their own work while also taking note in the overall group deliverables.

              Some tools that may be useful during the design phase to keep on track are Microsoft Project, Gannt Charts, Critical Path Analysis and PERT, and many more.

Execution/Production Phase

              The executing phase is the phase during which you operate to hit the deliverables set forth in the plan. The plan is only tentative and thus the executing phase may result in reevaluating the plan or seeking more help to determine a different design. It is important during the executing phase to try and stay motivated in order to get ahead of schedule or stay on track.

 

Monitoring Phase

              The monitoring phase should be occurring on the side throughout most of the project. The group should always be questioning the quality of their work, project activities and deadlines, along with what corrective actions need to be taken to ensure success. This phase will also occur after the conclusion of the execution stage as in this phase, the entire project will be evaluated for quality.

Closing Phase

              A project can only be useful to others if it is properly presented. The closing of the project involves ensuring that all goals of the project have been satisfied. If the goals of the project were not satisfied, this is where a recap of what occurred and why the project did not follow the planned path. It is sometimes possible that a project not meeting its goals will not be considered a failure. Here is where the members of the group can demonstrate what they have learned and will take away from the project along with how the project will help others.

              The project should be very well documented. This includes documenting the very technical aspects and the client-side aspects. Open source software is a great asset to the world however without documentation, it is little help to anyone.

 

Conclusion

              There are many phases to the management of a project. Overall, it is most important to budget the time effectively in order to meet goals in one semester. The semester goes very quickly and thus it is easy to become caught up in other time commitments. In a project that is self governing such as RCOS, it can be hard to motivate working on a project over other work that has more impending deadlines. Thus, it is imperative to set aside times that are dedicated to RCOS.  Motivation is a very important aspect of success. If the motivation for the project is lacking or at any time becomes lost, it will be hard to have a quality project. It is the responsibility of each group member to help to motivate the rest of the team. In the end, RCOS is a team and it is important to work and plan together to have a quality product.

References

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_management
http://www.mindtools.com/critpath.html
http://www.executivebrief.com/software-development/techniques-successful-software-product-management/