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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