Week 4 (9/23/2011) Fall 2011

Week 4 (9/23/2011) Fall 2011

The semester is picking up momentum with classes, projects, exams and RCOS. Students are doing a fantastic job. We have a standing room only during our Friday meetings. It is always a pleasure to see so many eager and attentive students.

We had four talks this week.

1) Brandon Justin, Austin Wagner, Alexander Shulgach, Umesh Jonnalagadda
:Mobile Shuttle Tracker
http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/mobile-shuttle-tracker/

2) Ben Shippee: BitProspector http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/bitprospector/

3)Joe Dougherty, Tom Rozansk, Matthhew Heffler: Network Management System


4) Matt Arsenault '11 and current graduate student at RPI (in Physics) on Open Source and me

Umesh and Alex gave a presentation (Brendon and Austin did not want to crowd the stage!) about their Shuttle Tracker (continued from last semester) project. They are joining hands with the webtech group - having a common code base (so changing to Ruby on Rails) and improving some algorithms. They have a very good schedule planned. Looking forward to great things from them. Here is their presentation slides

Mobile shuttle tracker_fall_2011_first_present

View more presentations from mskmoorthy.

Ben talked about his bitProspector (An open source Python/Django application to monitor Bitcoin mining and exchanges.) Ben writes that his work is based on Bitcoin project and to visit http://www.weusecoins.com/ as the introduction video explains the concept nicely. Implementation language will be Python and uses Django.

Joe D, Matt H and Tom R talked about their new project on managing networks Their proposed software will scale up nicely and their open source software also fills a niche in that area. Their presentation did not give much technical details.

Matt Arsenault gave an inspiring talk based on his involvement with open source software. Matt gave a lot of pointers how to get involved and how to stay involved and how to contribute to Open Source. Here are his presentation slides.

Rcos presentation 9-23-2011

View more presentations from mskmoorthy.

Yet another delightful week!

Videos of Talks (second and third weeks) Fall 2011

Micheal O'Keefe has been videoptaping our talks and has uploaded the talks at our youtube channel. Please check out http://www.youtube.com/rcosrpi1

Second week talk videos:

Joe Dougherty - mentoring



Priti Kumar (UPE) on ROCS



Peter Hajas on Presentations



Third Week Talks

Ben Shippee on Observatory



John Luther (Google) on Web M
Part 1


Part 2



Christian Johnson, Dan Kimball and Mike Horowitz on RPI Directory

Week 3 (9/16/2011) Fall 2011

Week 3 (9/16/2011) Fall 2011




We have the official beginning of Fall RCOS projects - students have selected their projects and they have already started working on it - by looking at the observatory and green smileys! (I have to be honest and I am distressed that a few groups have not entered their projects and many entered projects are still red - I do hope that that things will change for the better - an eternal optimist I am!)

This week we had three talks.

1) Ben Shippee on Observatory http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/observatory/

2) John Luther (google) on WebM http://www.webmproject.org/

3) Christian Johnson, Dan Kimball and Michael Horowitz o Directory App http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/rpi-directory-app/

Ben gave an introduction to Observatory and some of its features. Already many have placed their projects. Hope others will follow their footsteps.

John gave an overview of the features of webM (from WebM's webpage:
"WebM is an open, royalty-free, media file format designed for the web. WebM defines the file container structure, video and audio formats. WebM files consist of video streams compressed with the VP8 video codec and audio streams compressed with the Vorbis audio codec.") and many open source projects available with WebM. His talk was well received and many interesting questions followed. To top it off, John gave free T-Shirts to all students.

Christian, Dan and Mike (in spirit) gave an interesting talk on Directory project. They use Google apps, python and django. They also have a nice caching in the backend. They had built a prototype and they showed an excellent demo. A lot of questions and suggestions followed. They are on a fast track (and already number one on the dashboard).

A chilly Friday was warmed up by great talks.

Week 2 - Fall Semester - 9/9/2011

Week 2 9/9/2011



Sean O’Sullivan ’85 (Donor of RCOS) Named Entrepreneur of the Year
http://www.rpi.edu/about/inside/issue/v5n13/osullivan.html
Congratulations Mr. Sean O'Sullivan


This week we had five speakers

Zachary Alberico
Priti Kumar (UPE)
Joe Dougherty
Peter Hajas
Moorthy

Zach gave a brief talk about his project (he has been doing that with a few RCOS members) on a social network site for dating. Zach mentioned some of the cool features of his system that overcomes the algorithmic approach of other sites. Zach uses the
power of people to find a near perfect match and cleverly uses a revenue generating mechanism. The implementation language is Ruby on Rails. Zach's challenge is to make
others use his system. Zach's project provokes interesting questions and discussions.

Priti(UPE) talked about ROCS project (online course scheduling project) and possible projects (including project lead and User Interface portion). This is a great opportunity for some RCOS members to undertake.

Joe requested some of the members to take part in the mentoring role. Mentoring has been very effective in past semesters. I find one learns and does best by following/listening to the advise of their friends and peers. Hope we get some volunteers. Thanks to Mike O'K for taking the video.

Peter gave a scintillating talk on how to make an effective presentation. Peter makes his presentation a dialog between him and the audience. Peter also outlined etiquette
for both the presenters (no bullet, no list, more pictures) and for the audience (no laptop, no cell phone, paying full attention).

Moorthy (that is me) extolled the virtues of writing weekly blogs, having time lines, task lists and pushing code early and often.

What a fantastic way to spend a late evening in the midst of bright and eager students!

Week 1 Fall 2011 (9/2/2011)

Week 1 Fall 2011 (9/2/2011)



Our Fall semester has started with a bang for RCOS. There has been a lot of enthusiasm among students to participate and write open source code. At the same time, a few get intimidated by the past RCOS students and their accomplishments. It is my duty to encourage these students and mentor and guide them gently.



This week we had two talks.

1. Prof. Ben Chang (GSAS and Arts Department - RPI)
2. Mr. Ken Zalewski '89 '91 and Mr. Graylin Kim '11

Ben gave a fantastic tour de force of his research - on games, art and immerse art with videos and his slides. Please look at his website Ben Chang for a lot of his work. His main comment was that open source software is needed for artists - for longevity of the art, the custom software is too expensive, there is no vendor lock in. Ben practices what he preaches. Ben did mention the software development overhead associated with developing open source software. Ben suggested some tools that some of RCOS students can develop.

Ken Zalewki talked about he open source initiatives in NY State Senate and Assembly. They use a lot of open source tools and also contribute back. Main goals of their efforts are to make government transparent, efficient and useful to constituents and elected officials. NY Senate website runs using Drupal 7 which in turn enables the elected officials (trivia information - NY State has 62 senators) and their offices to make easy changes to their websites. Ken's group (part of dotCIO office) also encourages elected officials to maintain facebook, twitter and other social media. This enables the constituents to contact them for expressing their concerns (Ken mentioned about the recent marriage equality bill and the volume of messages). Some of the open source software they use include Linux, as well as Apache, PHP, Java, MySQL, Lucene/SOLR, Drupal, CiviCRM, and Squid.
For more information, please look at http://www.nysenate.gov/open. Their source code repository is in https://github.com/nysenatecio
Graylin who currently works at NY state CIO, started to work on their projects as his RCOS project. He now works there. This is yet another instance of RCOS contributing to the economic well being of NY State!

We are off to a great start and hope the momentum keeps going.