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.