Week 11 (4/17/2015) Spring 2015

Spring semester is racing to a fast finish. Students are exceling in Hackathons, Research Symposia reaping awards.

We had four talks this semester.

1)  Charlie Machalow, Austin Henandez, Alexander White - cDashboard
http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/cdashboard/ (Mentor Robert Rouhani)

2) Shane Aston - Alien Spoilers
http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/alien-spoilers/ (Menotr Emmet Hitz)

3)  Sam Yuan, Yunang  Chin- GoMueller, Yijang Li -
http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/gomuller/ (Mentor Sam Yuan)

4)  Jake Martin, Erin Quin, Satoshi Matsuura, Noah Goldman -
OverNight: http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/overnight/ (no mentor yet!) -
Finalists in HackUMass!

Charlie, Austen and Alexander gave an update of their progress on cDashboard. Charlie is fixing bugs (improved menustrip artifacts and auto updates) adding minor features. Alexander is working on the easier plugin systems using MEF which enable dynamic plugins. Austen is working on cMaps using google maps api. He showed a nice demo.  Their talk slides are here https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1ULtqhstfKuuvAWkI42V5118A6JW5M4qqRL4Kvu9mXcc/edit

Shane is working on a sytsem to prevent reading spoilers from reddit. He has a web application in which users can specify which reddit subgroups are not to be read. He showed a demo of his system and the technology used (Django, Python, SqLite and some other cool stuff) in the system. I hope  he posts his talk slides and updtae his blogs!

Sam Yunang and  Yijang gave a talk about their android app to help maintain a fixed exercise schedule. They showed a demo of their implementations done so far.  They plan to use qr code reader of the exercise machine which wil help in how to use the machine effectively. Their talk slides are found here https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/17dJjhARUR3sYUemW32Vk9R7EQmi2BLXUuHWxy_LEEgI/pub?start=false&loop=false&delayms=3000&slide=id.p4

Jake, Noah, erin and Satoshi talked about their Overnight hardware app which will charge the android phone witout overcharging. They showed how Android phones hasve to be charged. Sice the charging is done  overnight, they couple an alrm with charging. Intially Android is charged at 50 percentage and a couple of hours before waking the android is charged at 100 percent. They are planning to make thieir hardware more robust and use an app to charge.  They also showed a demo of their project.  Pleae see their work at HackUmass http://hackumass-ii.challengepost.com/submissions and http://challengepost.com/software/overnight

Again a well spent Friday evening!

Week 10 (4/10/2015) Spring Semester

Sparse Attendance on 4/10/2015! :(

There has been very few students in our 10th April meeting and it was disconcerting (could be due to anumber of exams in this week). Hopefully they will catch up with their RCOS projects soon.

We had three talks this week.

1) Samson Bonfante - Digital Manufacturing -
http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/tsense/  (Mentor Sebatian Sarbora)

2)  Toshi Piazza, Richard Lin, Kevin Zhang and  Alex Shin -Toy Engine
- http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/toy-engine/ (Mentor Robert Rouhani)

3)  John Behnke and Zach Minster - Swift and You

Samson talked about his Manufacturing project (about digital signatures, compression and webservices) with Step Tools on Manufacturing. Martin pitched in and gave an overview of digital manufacturing and the role of open source software in that. Sams slides may be found here https://files.slack.com/files-pri/T033VT1N8-F04C648HT/download/rcos2.pptx

Toshi, Richard, Kevin and Alex taked about their toy engine. They have built a skeleton of their core and they even showed a demo. All of them are freshmen and it is great to see their progress.

John and ach magnanimousy pitched in to give the thirs talk. They showed the power of Swift (apple's new programming language). They showed a demo of the coof features of that language. Their talk slides are here https://slack-files.com/files-pri-safe/T033VT1N8-F04C8SF1M/swift_and_you.pdf?c=1428843115-39623421b21a049582adae1c9e05cf2c41779bae

A few members of RCOS group is going to HackUMass Saturday 11th April. Afew of RCOS students heped with Accepted Students Day. It is very nice to have such supporting Students. I will be remiss if I did not mention that a good showig by RCOS students on UGRS on April 8th.

Week 9 (4/3/2015) Spring Semester 2015

Spring break is over. We are on the stretch run. With so many end of the year activities  stdents re hard pressed for time. Hope we will have some successful projects  Out of the thee talks, only one was pertaining to a RCOS project. On the other hand, Eric, Josh, Seve and Kiana won th ebest education award in the recently concluded Hackathon at Binghampton.


1)  Adam Siemiginowski - Code for America Troy, Brigade and Hack Nights
2) Blake Lingenau, Dylan Lingenau, Michael Macelletti, Patrick
Hesselbach - Eve Online Market Analysis Tool - Big Data
http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/eve-online-market-analysis-tool/
3) Josh Goldberg - JavaScript Sprites - The Hard Way

Adam gae a passionate speech about Code for America - Troy Brigade. Group in Troy wants to be the 57th brigade in the nation. They are planning hacknights to get the group an deadership team going. His talk slides may be found here https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1tjVrp6kMQMBK_j5xem3a6kHWKZmVVC4bQpRemEWWOzM/edit#slide=id.p

Many students were interested in woking with Code for America and taked to Adam personlly.

Blake, Dylan , Michael and Patrick about Ec Market Analysis tool - in a Big data framework. Their backend will be in C++ and the front end will be in python. They are getting the data in JSON format. If and when the need arises they plan to use MongoDB and a query language. There were many interesting and probing questions from the students.

Josh talked about using Javascipt to reerseengineer sprites and bricks of game of yore (like Mario Brothers and Pokeman ). He talked about his sprite design, algorithms he used and compression techniques. His talk slides may be found in the slack https://files.slack.com/files-pri/T033VT1N8-F049CQT8X/download/javascript_sprites_the_hard_way.pptx  A write up about his work on Mario (his project before joining RCOS) http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/10/17/this-college-kid-painstakingly-recreated-super-mario-brothers-for-the-web/

and http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2014/06/11/the-guy-behind-full-screen-mario-thinks-nintendos-mario-maker-looks-suspiciously-familiar/

Again a friday evening well spent listening and learning. I wish my ability to absorb new material and the detais quickly will improve than at the current moment,

Week 8 (3/20/2015) Spring Semester 2015

This is the Friday before Spring Break (we had a snow squall on Friday - I am reluctant to call it a Spring break) We had a sparse attendence with students going for Hackathon at BU, studentst attending a talk at RPI Security Club and of course students leaving for home for Spring break. We had two talks.

1) Aesa Kamar, Barry Hu , Johnny Chen -PokeAPI-v2
http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/pokeapi-v2/

2)Brain Callahan (Graduate Student STS) OpenBSD, the proactively
secure Unix-like operating systeam and you: software used every day

Aesa and Barry talked about their PokEAPI-v2 - a centralized server which improves the PokeApI-v1 - They are building it on Ruby on Rails. They even showethey re-emphasized MVC with Ruby and he showed a demo connecting Octave to displaying grahs of equatons (with Ruby)

Brian gave a fantastic overview talk on FreeBSD. Brain is a vetetran FreeBSD developer and he is involved in Capital District and New York CIty BSD user groups. His talk slides may be found here http://devio.us/~bcallah/rcos2015.pdf

Hi stalk slides found its way to Hacker News soon after he presented at RCOS https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9240533

All in all very nice talks to listen to before the spring break!

Week 7 (3/13/2015) Spring Semester 2015

The weeks are flying, I was feeling overwhelmed last week and hence did not write a blog.
Tuesday amlla group meeting with mentors seems to be ging well.

On Friday (3.13.2015) we had our usual meetings with the following speakers.

1)Rob Russo, Vijay Nambiar, Josh Baik, Ylonka Machado, Peter Ko -
Lapsus http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/lapsus-linguae/

2)Joshua Makinen, Jim Boulter, Christina Hammer, Dennis Fogerty -
MeNext http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/menext/

3)Branden Clark - DynamoRIO http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/dr-memory/

Lapsus is a speech feedback to make better presentations.  They are using google speech API to analyze the speech and parse - give feedback to the user to impove ones public speaking ability. They even showed a small demo -  They have a web front end. They have a plan to complete this before the end of the semester.

MeNext has come a long way. Joshua is refactoring the backend. Jim is working on the IPhoen, Dennis is working on Android, and Christina is working on Windows Phone and Theo on the UI. They seem to be well onto theor way in making MeNext usable. Already it is on the AppSotr.

Breden talked about DynamoRio. He and his partners are making steady progress,. Bendan showed a nice demo of using DynamoRio for side attack.

I think we may have onlySeventy percent attendance - the course loads are picking up. Nevertheless who so ever came seem to be intrested in learning and asking intelligent questions and sharing their knowledge.

Week 5 (2/23/2015) Spring Semester

31 of 43 projects have been updated

26 of 43 repositories have been updated

16 of 43 blogs have been updated

I am just pasting the 5th week Observatory dashboard just to be proud of the students' accomplishments and hard work.

This week we had three talks.
1) Josh Goldberg - ASP.NET MVC
2) Brian Kelley, John Behnke, Zach Minster - Where R U? - Designing a
Cross Platform App

3) Aaron Gunderson and Nick Pitt - Basic Django

Josh talked about C # and asp.net and how the model view controller works. He gave  His homeworker as a demo using his methodology and technology stack. There were interesting questions and he answered them quite well.

Brian, John and Zach talked about building apps for IPhone and Andrioid. They emphasized the Dos and Donts in app building (mostly to conform with the standrads of respective platform and use of the libraries).

Aaron and NIck presented Django as a Model View Controller using Django. They had an application built using Djanago and helped explain the concept with that example.

All in all excellent talks. I wish I am faster to understand and experiment with their site/code. (That is my problem! :( )

Week 4 (2/16/2015) Spring Semester

We are already on the fourth week into the Spring Semester.

We did not have small group meeting this Tuesday as RPI has a mini winter break (Monday was Presidents day).

On Friday we had three speakers

:1) Colin Rice '14 - Internet Harder - AutoRoute
2) Rob Rouhani and Aaron Gunderson- Unit Tests
3) John Drogo- Mean Stack

Here is a twitter photo of Colin Rice giving the talk https://twitter.com/rcosrpi/status/568886071997702145/photo/1

Eric and Dimitar are working with Colin on this project http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/autoroute/  Idea behind this project is make the routing scheme finer and have some kind of cost mechanism (for packets) to make it to work is Blom filter (to stoe the BGP table efficienty).

Rob and Aaron gave a fantastic talk with continuous integration and unit test. I did not know till that talk that there is a utility you can integrate with Github (Travis-CI)  He has posted his slides https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1yxSFWgp-u1vtA1ZEIXBQ62zEIhTgUBnJj3wyvM5onTg/edit?usp=sharing They also gave a live demo where unit tests failed and he modified the code to fix it. To effectively use continuous integration, one has to write unit tests.
https://github.com/rcos/VendingMachine

John Drago talked about MEAN stack (for web development) (mongo, express, Angular, nodejs) and how it is much better than LAMP Stack (linux,Apache, MySQL and PHP). He brought out the good aspects of nodejs (javascript intepreter meshes with Python) an dhow nonSQL database like MOngoDB one can have a dynamic database.  He showed a live graph demo with web crawers and it was quite impressive. I wanted to learn what he did (as it is something similar to what John Punin and I did a long time ago). I am waiting for his post.

All in all I learnt a lot from these meetings. Highlight of the meeting seems to be free google swags that they distributed at the beginning of the meeting.