Week 11, November 19, 2010
The semester is slowly winding down. Aft these talks, we are more or less done with update talks of most of the groups. I am impressed with the tenacity of students in getting their projects to speed and in some cases to completion!.
This week we had update talks by Ben, Brendon and Lindsey, Nick and Ellis and Matt. Nate gave a fine presentation on his work on improving dashboard.
1) Ben Shippe has more or less completed his work on creating a server for displaying open street maps (similar to what JumpStart International does). He even had a live demo. It is extremely creditable to Ben as his server is a $60 second/third hand computer we got with very little RAM. This prevented him to cache the map tiles. He had also very little disk space to have the detailed map of the world. Ben jus showed the detailed map of UK. Ben has documented most of his porting stratgey so that his efforts could easily be documented.
2) Brendon and Linsey are moving along in their media content delivery systems. Lindsey is working on the backend data base issues where Brendon is concentrating on
the video display. They also showed a demo of their project. They are currently hosting their project in myrpi website (thanks Brian M and the rest of the Web Tech Group). They also showed off their vote and nominate social aspects of visualizing high end video. Very Good Progress by these two gentlemen.
3) Nick and Ellis have made a very good progress with their MYDoctor project. Their project started of with a goal to help single mothers (Nick and Ellis has nearly accomplished that goal) with a web site. They have extended their goals to help all patient and physicians. They are currently adapting open source software project (by some one else) in secure chatting/secure communication. Nick and Ellis showed a demo of their project and again it looks very good.
4) Matt is continuing with his open source software development efforts in the milkyway project (using BIONC). Matt's job is make the GPU work faster and reliably. Matt is doing a fantastic job of evaluating the various compiler/programming environments for various GPU. Since Milkyway is a big name project for RPI and tens of thousands of people are helping with their volunteer computing. So it is no wonder Matt is getting GPU units shipped to him overnight for their (GPU's) use in the project. Matt is testing them to utilize their computing potential.
True to the open source efforts, Nate is leading an effort to improve the dashboard. He is calling his system Observatory. Nate has already implemented some portion of it using Python, Django and JQuery. Nate is looking for volunteers to make more contributions to Observatory/Dashboard. Nate has posted his talk slides to the group.
What a pleasure for me to work such enthusiastic and creative students. I learn so much from them - their youth rubs on me - not only I become wiser, but also I feel younger!
Please check our dashboard for further details.
Sunday, November 21, 2010
Sunday, November 14, 2010
Week 10, November 12, 2010
Week 10, November 12, 2010
What an emotionally up and down week was last week - On Wednesday (11/10/2010), Poly (rpi student paper ) RCOS was featured in a news article ( see here for the actual article). That article had some positive things to say. On Thursday, Prof. Barbara Liskov of MIT(Turing Award Winner 2010) gave a talk on "Power of Abstraction". The talk rekindles my memories of my graduate student days (as I had been reading the papers (mentioned during the talk) and "partially" understanding the concepts). On Friday, Dr. Robert P. Ingalls an executive officer of RPI Cs department and teacher extraordinaire passed away. Dr. Ingalls was most helpful to RCOS and its mission and helped me greatly dealing with beauracracies. RCOS will miss Dr. Ingalls.
RCOS meeting went on as usual irrespective of the ups and downs. We had
four talks.
1) Steve talked about his Sahana Eden installation module updates to ease the installation process of Saha Eden. He has made the final enhancements and has submitted his code for review before getting accepted.
2) Liam talked about his update on secure skype like system. Liam has made the software consistent between client and server side. Liam has been using Protocol Buffer for his system. Liam is well on his way to make a substantial contribution to his system.
3) John and his group talked their update on Universal Batch Converter. They are making the GUI using Qt. The GUI is going on well. They showed even a brief demo. Since their system is a plug-in type, it can be easily extended to any kind of converters. This group is looking for Macs to test the portability of their system.
4) Finally Paul talked about his update on secure ripping. He divided his task into three parts 1) a command line tagger 2) a command line transcoding utility, and 3) a command line secure ripping. Paul has made a lot of progress with command line tagger and secure ripping. I wish he updates the dashboard properly (Some of Paul's updates are in here (based of firmant system of Rob Escriva developed as a RCOS project!) )
Then we split into smaller groups and mentors discussed with different project groups. We are still trying to get our mentor system to work well and we have been heading in that direction. Please give us/me a feedback.
I have to end this blog with a plea to update blogs and push your code.
What an emotionally up and down week was last week - On Wednesday (11/10/2010), Poly (rpi student paper ) RCOS was featured in a news article ( see here for the actual article). That article had some positive things to say. On Thursday, Prof. Barbara Liskov of MIT(Turing Award Winner 2010) gave a talk on "Power of Abstraction". The talk rekindles my memories of my graduate student days (as I had been reading the papers (mentioned during the talk) and "partially" understanding the concepts). On Friday, Dr. Robert P. Ingalls an executive officer of RPI Cs department and teacher extraordinaire passed away. Dr. Ingalls was most helpful to RCOS and its mission and helped me greatly dealing with beauracracies. RCOS will miss Dr. Ingalls.
RCOS meeting went on as usual irrespective of the ups and downs. We had
four talks.
1) Steve talked about his Sahana Eden installation module updates to ease the installation process of Saha Eden. He has made the final enhancements and has submitted his code for review before getting accepted.
2) Liam talked about his update on secure skype like system. Liam has made the software consistent between client and server side. Liam has been using Protocol Buffer for his system. Liam is well on his way to make a substantial contribution to his system.
3) John and his group talked their update on Universal Batch Converter. They are making the GUI using Qt. The GUI is going on well. They showed even a brief demo. Since their system is a plug-in type, it can be easily extended to any kind of converters. This group is looking for Macs to test the portability of their system.
4) Finally Paul talked about his update on secure ripping. He divided his task into three parts 1) a command line tagger 2) a command line transcoding utility, and 3) a command line secure ripping. Paul has made a lot of progress with command line tagger and secure ripping. I wish he updates the dashboard properly (Some of Paul's updates are in here (based of firmant system of Rob Escriva developed as a RCOS project!) )
Then we split into smaller groups and mentors discussed with different project groups. We are still trying to get our mentor system to work well and we have been heading in that direction. Please give us/me a feedback.
I have to end this blog with a plea to update blogs and push your code.
Sunday, November 7, 2010
Week 9, November 5, 2010
Week 9: November 5, 2010
With a new moon on Friday and many Indians were celebrating Diwali, the festival of lights, RCOS put on its own show of "fireworks" of talks. This week we had talks by four groups of students.
1) Graylin Kim hs been working on Open Legislation with NY State Senate dotCIO's office in their open quest for
open and transparent government. Graylin has been pursuing how to make this
efforts making legislatives public (and provide an API for searching and build a prototype)
available to other states. In this regards he is providing suggestive tags to bills
so that one can get information about the bills - like who proposed it who amended it, who voted for it, what stage of the process the bill is in etc). It is a fascinating work with deep implications on democracy. Graylin will be writing a blog about his implementations and his plan for the next stages.
2) Matt O'Brien has been working on management tools for Routers. His immediate client will be Networking Lab at RPI. Matt has been using PERL and Tk (GUI) to have multiple tabbed terminals (with automatic sign on). Matt has completed a basic GUI and a basic telnet session working. Matt plans to add bells and whistles to make his system useable before the end of this semester.
3) Joe Dougherty has been working with Volunteer Fire Management System. Joe has been using C++ with Qt. Joe has built the back-end of the program (using class structures preached in Software Engineering class).Joe is using SQLite for his back end data base. Many fire departments want to use his software. Joe's prelimiary gui design and implementation is given below.
4) John Lee and Tom Alexander presented a talk on making wifi (at RPI) work with Android. They provide a software solution.
They have releases this version in Android market place - They have also posted their code on the web. Both John and Tom have done an excellent job of making rpi wifi (hence any other university in principle) to work with android. Their next step may be to make their system even better and user friendlier.
Thanks to Alex (RCOS mentor) keeping time and gently enforcing it, the speakers finished right on time. For the last twenty minutes there were small group discussions with mentors floating between groups. The jury is still out whether breaking into small groups will help further foster FOSS ideas. I sincerely believe this will enable people to ask questions and learn from each other in a small personalized setting.
On Friday, our beloved dashboard looked more green than red (i.e. lots of students groups were updating wither their blogs or pushing the code)
With a new moon on Friday and many Indians were celebrating Diwali, the festival of lights, RCOS put on its own show of "fireworks" of talks. This week we had talks by four groups of students.
1) Graylin Kim hs been working on Open Legislation with NY State Senate dotCIO's office in their open quest for
open and transparent government. Graylin has been pursuing how to make this
efforts making legislatives public (and provide an API for searching and build a prototype)
available to other states. In this regards he is providing suggestive tags to bills
so that one can get information about the bills - like who proposed it who amended it, who voted for it, what stage of the process the bill is in etc). It is a fascinating work with deep implications on democracy. Graylin will be writing a blog about his implementations and his plan for the next stages.
2) Matt O'Brien has been working on management tools for Routers. His immediate client will be Networking Lab at RPI. Matt has been using PERL and Tk (GUI) to have multiple tabbed terminals (with automatic sign on). Matt has completed a basic GUI and a basic telnet session working. Matt plans to add bells and whistles to make his system useable before the end of this semester.
3) Joe Dougherty has been working with Volunteer Fire Management System. Joe has been using C++ with Qt. Joe has built the back-end of the program (using class structures preached in Software Engineering class).Joe is using SQLite for his back end data base. Many fire departments want to use his software. Joe's prelimiary gui design and implementation is given below.
4) John Lee and Tom Alexander presented a talk on making wifi (at RPI) work with Android. They provide a software solution.
They have releases this version in Android market place - They have also posted their code on the web. Both John and Tom have done an excellent job of making rpi wifi (hence any other university in principle) to work with android. Their next step may be to make their system even better and user friendlier.
Thanks to Alex (RCOS mentor) keeping time and gently enforcing it, the speakers finished right on time. For the last twenty minutes there were small group discussions with mentors floating between groups. The jury is still out whether breaking into small groups will help further foster FOSS ideas. I sincerely believe this will enable people to ask questions and learn from each other in a small personalized setting.
On Friday, our beloved dashboard looked more green than red (i.e. lots of students groups were updating wither their blogs or pushing the code)
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