Big Red (Really RCOS) Freak-out Week

Week 4: (2/19/2010)

This week is a big red freak-out at RPI - We have a big hockey game during the weekend and the school spirit is high. On the other hand school and software spirit is always high at RCOS. RCOS is all about students and open source software - It is for them, by them and for them. My job as a co-director is just to enable them to reach greater heights and not to be a hindrance to them.

This week we had five great talks:

1. Devin Ross
2. Joseph Dougherty and their group
3. Nate Stedman
4. Rob Carr and Amy W
5. Matt Arsenault

Devin Ross talked about Iphone Applications and his tapku library. His work has already been noticed with downloads, followers. Now adding another feather to his cap, his library software details may appear in the forthcoming book - stay tuned.

Joe and his group are working on Votebox. They have the hardware donated tothem from various companies. They are planning to redesign their software in C++ with a Java front end. We hope that their system will be ready for Freshmen elections this Fall (and may be 2010 presidential elections too!)

Nate and Rob's group (wizards of gnome and seed fame) are designing two different versions of presentations software for Gnome Desktop (Openoffice presentation sucks - according to Nate!). Nate already had a sleek demo and it is very impressive. Rob's group is designing the system bottom up and many of the subsytems are in place. Nate's implementation language is Vala.

Matt is building clutter bindings for Haskell and he has released his version clutterhs0.1 - This semester he wants to improve adding more fancy applications and release clutterhs0.2 Before the semester is over Matt hopes to release clutterhs1.0 Matt is writing in Haskell and it is good to have some pure functional people in the group.

Students are developing software, using the state of art technology tools and pushing the technology further. After listening to these talks and other students' perceptive questions and comments, my understanding of computer science keeps improving. Thanks!

The mentors are doing a wondeful work. Eric's dashboard, Rob deploying planet blog aggregator (and donating his machines, rack and being sysadmin and more) and Josh's genle prodding help the center a long way. Ms. Duffy wrote a
nice blog about her visit and talk at RCOS.

It is an open invitation to other people to get involved in RCOS - be a mentor, developer, donor(!) to RCOS. We welcome you with your creative input and suggestions. It is up to you to step up the plate and play ball! (Spring is almost here and my baseball metaphors are all over!)