Week 8, October 29, 2010

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.