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.