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.
Sunday, October 31, 2010
Sunday, October 24, 2010
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!
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!
Sunday, October 17, 2010
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.
Monday, October 11, 2010
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 )
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 )
Sunday, October 3, 2010
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.
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.
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