Week 5: (2/24/2010) and (2/26/2010)
What a wonderful week with talks and a full moon to cap on Saturday of this week. In India, it is spring time and a colorful festival Holi is celebrated on Fullmoon day.
On Wedensday (2/24), we had a talk by FSF guru Mr. Richard Stallman on Copyright Vs Community. The talk started late at 8:45 pm (instead of at 8:00 pm) due to a travel delay (We had a big snow storm that day and many schools were closed on that day - of course RPI is open no matter what). Despite the fact, it started late, we had a good turnout of students and visitors.
This topic of copyright is of interest to most of the students interested in developing free and open source software. After enumerating the existing problems, Mr. Stallman provided his solutions to copyright problems and provided convincing arguments (at least he convinced me then). Copyright laws are originally intended to enable creativity to enrich the society. In the process, the laws changed to help big corporations and not artists and programmers. Mr. Stallman's solutions are intended to rectify this and who does not want this? There were many interesting questions (such How to collect and allocate money to artists depending on their talents and popularity) and discussions. We had a nice audio support from RPI media services (That person stayed through the talk and even asked a RPITV crew, last years talk of RMS was one of the most watched ones at RPI). Tim Horton (RCOS participant) took pictures. As the topic indicates, the whole effort is community based. We owe a big thanks to Luis Ibanez (of Kitware) for organizing the talk, Rob Escriva (RCOS mentor) for co-ordinating the student volunteers and help in numerous ways, Peter Healy and Bryan Yudkin (RCOS participants) for transportation help and finally to Jason Sanchez (RPICS graduate student) and Andrew Zonenberg (RPISEC) for some crucial conversational help. Thanks are also to the following people who work behind the scenes: Prof. Badri Roysam, Ms. Laraine Michaelides, Dean Prabhat Hajela and Ms. Kimberly Ellenwood. We profusely thank Mr. Sean O'Sullivan who make these talks happen by his generous donation.
2/26/2010 Friday Talks:
We have six students group talks on Friday
1) Sean Austin, Diana Mazzola, Grifin Milsap, Richmund Fries on DroidViz
2) Tim Horton on Contacts Lists for Gnome
3) Corey McClymonds and Patrick Stetter on Music Database Tools
4) John McMaster on universal decompiler
5) Joe Chrzanowski on Was PHP framework
6) Josh Elser on RPInventory
All the talks are wonderful. These projects are all better described here.
Droidviz provides the first open source visualization toolkit and API for Androids - they plan to make a plasma pong for Android to test their API.
Tim Horton (Seed Fame) is beginning to make a final push for his contact lists.
Corey and Patrick (First time RCOS participants) are doing a great job - They even had a live demo during first presentation. Their talk is on lines at dashboard. They are going to provide a toolkit to manage your music cds.
John McMaster (our resident embedded system expert) gave a fabulous summary of his decompiler project. Many RCOS participants will welcome such a decompiler for their own projects and work.
Joe gave a detailed presentation of his WAX PHP framework. Joe has already done a lot of work. It is a matter of days before Joe releases his first version of code. Joe's first RCOS project offcampus rental has been utilized a great deal this semester (with the change in adminidtartion's policy of residence requirements). His project was also mentioned in op-ed page in poly (2/17/2010). (His project page acknowledges RCOS!)
Josh Elser (RCOS's gentle mentor) gave a historical perspective of RPInventory - He gave a nice summary of the challenges faced by an open source project and how to overcome them. His software started in Fall of 2008 and is still going strong with a number of clubs adapting his software. Josh is improvinag his system so that many more clubs and universities and colleges adapt his system. Josh also talked about the new undergrdauate labortatories (including space for RCOS) intiative in CS department
Here are his slides.
RPInventory 2-25-2010
View more presentations from je2451.
Josh's blog post is here.
Looking forward to great talks in weeks to come.
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