Week 12 (11/18/11) Fall 2011 Semester

Week 12 (11/18/11) Fall 2011 Semester

Fall semester is slowly winding down. We had four talks by students and a gust talk by Andrew Parsons (http://twitter.com/MrAndyPuppy • http://blogs.msdn.com/andrewparsons from Microsft.

Student presenters were:

1) Alex Gaynor on NumPy for PyPy http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/numpy-for-pypy/

2) Asher Glick and Beth Towns on Briefcase
http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/briefcase/

3) Jerry Schneider on BlueMesh http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/bluemesh/

4) Josh Komoroske on tcp multiplexing https://github.com/joshdk/muxd

and our guest speaker Andrew Parsons talked about Microasoft and Its open source efforts

Alex has been steadily working on getting NumPy working - He has to modify his design to take care of type issues. Their current solution seems to compile and execute very fast. He also talked about a related project of f2py.

Asher and Beth talked about Briefcase. Beth has problems with the server and hence backend work is being stalled. asher has been coding away in Javascript to get to the front end. He had a skeleton working - still needs a lot of functions to be implemented. They have done a very good job so far.

Jerry has been working on getting all the thread issues resolved. He got to the point where there are no more crashes. Jerry plans to get an application with his blue mesh running before the end of the semester. Again Jerry showed his tenacity to overcome his obstacles. He has finished two of the four tasks he has set.

Josh gave a fascinating about tcp multiplexing. This is especially useful when some ports are blocked. Josh showed a number of interesting demos of his software. An excellent job by Josh (even though he has not officially in the payroll of rcos this semester)

Andrew enlightened us about the open source software efforts at Microfot. Andrew aslo pointed the one of the core kenrel developers (for liunx kernel) is a microsoft employee. Andrew also talked about other competitions that Microsoft sponosres.
Through raffles, Andrew gave away many prizes from Microsoft.

As usual students asked very many interesting questions and suggestions to all the speakers. An excellent particpation and their questions amde me realize some of the finer details which I did not pay attention to.


An excellent week where I gained a lot of new ideas, broadened my understanding and made me appreciate things that I have not seen before.