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! :( )