Week 12, December 3, 2010

Week 12, December 4, 2010

TGIF - for me these four letter have a different connotation - I look forward to Fridays so that I have a chance to interact with a vibrant, creative and enthusiastic group of students interested in Open Source Software efforts. I have to congratulate Nate (and Rob) for getting recognized for Ease at this blog post. At the penultimate week, the four groups of students gave final presentations of their projects. Thanks to Tim we have youtube videos of the presented talks.

1. Cihan Caglayan gave her update and final presentation on RCOS Sahana Eden for empowering local artisans. She has a design document for the three modules that will be essential for her system. She plans to complete the project during winter break. Here is a link to her blog post. Below is her presentation (in you tube)




2. John McMaster gave his final (really his last presentation as he is graduating a semester early) on UVNet Universal Decompiler. He has made substantial progress on GUI, Python API, streamlining unit tests, modularizing his code for plugins and he is writing a paper. John has awesome talents with reverse engineering and decompiling Please look at his blog for further details. RCOS (and in particular the current co-director) is going to miss the wisdom of John McM. John's talk may be found in this youtube.


3. Nate gave his final presentation on Ease. Nate has accomplished a great deal and Ease is gaining an active set of users. It goes without saying that Nate gave his presentation in Ease. The fact that Ease is translated into many languages is itself a testimony to his work. Nates blog gives further details. (You may also want to look at his code page.) Nate is still working to squash a few bugs and make further enhancements. Nate's talk may be found in this youtube link.


4. Alex and Joe gave their presentation on Touch of Math. As usual their presentation is awesome. Joe gave a demo of their system in a pc browser and IPhone (I have the audacity to ask for it to run in IPad - Naturally it will take them a few seconds to make it run in IPad). Their blog describes greater details. Joe's presentation may be found in this youtube video.


I sit and watch in jaw dropping amazement the level of participation and achievement A tip of my (invisible) hat to every one who presented these wonderful talks (and students who asked intelligent questions and suggestions) and to Tim Horton an unassuming student who took the videos. Based on this I can certainly predict that the future looks bright! As I finish typing this blog, I wish the outside world (at least people at RPI) appreciate the level of commitment and work of these young students.