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.