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.