Speeding Forward

Week 11: (4/16/2010)

Five current RCOS students will be presenting in RPI's first Undergraduate Symposium They are
1) Eric Allen
2) Ben Boeckel, Rob Escriva and Joe Werther
3) Allen lavoie
4) John McMaster
5) Devin Ross.

The presentations/posters are on April 27th from 2:00 pm to 6:00 pm in DCC (Posters) and CII (Presentations). Congratulations and Good Luck to these students. Besides these five, past RCOS student Alex Radocea and RPISEC club member Andrew Zonenberg will also be presenting on the research symposium. These seven students are among a select group of undergraduate student (RPI) presenters on the symposium.

Final Poster presentation for RCOS Projects will be on May 7th (from 10 am to 5:00 pm) in DCC Great Hall. Please start preparing/thinking about your posters.

We had six excellent talks by thefollowing students/groups.

1) Graylin Kim and Cihan Caglayan
2) Nate Stedman
3) Tim Horton
4) Matt Arsenault
5) Josh Elser
6) Corey McClymonds and Patrick Stetter

As usual, dashboard http://dashboard.rcos.cs.rpi.edu/groups/dashboard/1 has the latest update on their projects.

Graylin and Cihan are overcoming the challenges of communication problems, jargons, obsure documents on their work with the NY State office of open legislative efforst. They are working with django, github and making a slow but steady progress in their Fllodlight work. Their communications, documents are in floodlight site.

Nate gave a fine presentation on Ease, his gnome slide presentation tool. It was written on top of Gnome, GTK toolkit and written in Lava. It has many interesting features and can easily include video embedding utilizing Gnome's library support. Nate's demo of his system went without a flaw. Nate may be producing a video (youtube) of Seed for a wider audience. importantly, his project was selected as one GSOC project and a student from France (Steafn?) may be developing with Nate on Ease as Stefan's GSOC project. This is a fantastic news to Seed, Nate and RCOS.

Tim's contatct list program has come a long way. His system has two backends for gmail and Thuuderbird. During his implementation process, Tim ditat discovered bugs in Vala compiler and libgdata. These by themselves are a big contribution to Open Source Community. Tim showed a demo of the current version of his system. It was a quite an impressive system.

Matt's implementation of clutter in Haskel has been released. That system has a few followers. Matt continues to test his implementation besides doing a lot of bug fixes/patches in the original clutter implementation.

Josh presented and showed a demo of his current version of RPInventory His latest contribution is to add dynamic fields (with data type integer or string). This added feature will make RPInventory more attractive to a larger number of users.

Corey and Patrick's uctui a collection tool user interface for media libraries. They use two backends for their music library collections. They have a command line interface working. They are planning to have a GUI tool for easy interaction to their tool and their backend libraries.
I will like to end with a quote from Corey and Patrick's blog.
Thank you open source. Who said code isn't valuable just for reading :)

That statement alone made my day! (This is what RCOS stand for to make students relaize the value of open source software and be a part of this wonderful and sharing community!)