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 )