Week 7 October 22, 2010

Week 7: October 22,2010

This weekend was “RPI Family Weekend 2010”, so campus activities have been in full swing. We also had our Fall UPE/ACM/RCOS Programming Competition. We are grateful to Bloomberg, Vanguard, Facebook and Lockheed Martin for their generous support. Many current and past RCOS students participated in the competition.

This week progress presentations were given by:

1) Peter Hajas (Mobile Notifier)
Peter gave an excellent talk. His previous talk has been posted to Youtube! Peter's talk included a cool demo. Please read his blog for further details. The most important news is that Peter has released the alpha.1 version of Mobile Notifier. As Peter says, this is “way way better than other notifiers for IPhones!”

2) Brendon Ashby and Lindsey Kennard (Media Content Delivery System)
Brendon and Lindsey talked about various aspects of the High Definition Media Content Delivery System. A major part of their talk was a tutorial on High Definition content delivery . Lindsey is working on the database while as Brendon is working on developing an open source high definition media delivery (using existing systems). They have not blogged anything. Please update you blog with slides of your talk and update your code!

3) John McMaster (UVNet Universal Decompiler)
John is chipping away at his reverse engineering project, both the front end and the back end. On the back end, he is working on resolving function calls (this is a challenging problem with dynamic links). On the front end he is using Qt to display the content of large files effectively (this is also a challenging problem). I am confident that John will come up with ingenious methods to solve these problems.

4) Joe LaBarbera and Alex Radocea (Touch of Math)
Alex and Joe gave a thought provoking talk on their project, Touch of Math. They showed a cool demo on the web, as well as on a touch screen Android. They are mainly using Javascript technology. Alex and Joe’s system is able to manipulate simple arithmetic expressions and statements with +,-,*,/. They have a clear idea what their next tasks will be. They get a pat on the back for posting their code as well as keeping their blog up to date.


All students - please keep updating your blogs so that others can track the progress of your project (you can now spend less time on explaining the background and more time on what you are actually doing and how you are doing it). Please push your code earlier than later (“Release early, release often”). Please be sure to continue attending the weekly RCOS meetings. Please also participate and share your knowledge by reviewing other group’s projects. This is all what FOSS about!

Week 4 October 1, 2010 Students' presentations

Week 4 October 1, 2010

RPI's annual fall career fair (by NSBE/SHPE) was held this weekend. This meant a lot of alumni and other company recruiters visited our campus. Many of them were interested in talking to students doing projects with RCOS.

We had a guest speaker Mr. Steve Dale from IBM Austin. He is a manager of Extreme Blue Division at Austin. He talked about the open source efforts in IBM and intern opportunities for students. Even though students work for three months, many of them are able to provide patches to open source software projects. In particular he mentioned about file system cache patch that interns were able to accomplish.

In addition to our guest speaker, we had our regular students speakers. They are

1) Anthony Loven

2) Ben Shippee

3) Steve Trombetti

Anthony Loven has been diligently working on a bot for the chatroom. This bot currently works in #rcos channel in irc://irc.freedom.net - Anthony's project is to provide a web interface to the bot. Anthony has given a detailed road map for his project. His presentation may be found here.

Ben Shippee is continuing with his providing a backup server for Jump start international for Open Street Maps. He has installed a working version and documented all of the details to make the server working. Ben is trying to cope up with he storage requirements and to complete installing one last missing component (which lacked documentation). This project will be an extremely useful project who want to use Open Street Maps.

Steve is continuing his work with his project of installation of Sahana Eden (a HFOSS project) for system administrators who use Sahana-Eden (An emergency management system -currently installed to help flood victims in Pakistan). Though he completed this project in summer (along James McMillan), he created a stand alone system to configure Sahana-Eden. This semester he wants to integrate the configuration system in the main system itself. Once he completes that, Steve will take a project that involves a GIS (Geographical Information Systems) module to Sahana Eden.

These and other projects are going well considering the fact we are in the middle of an onslaught of tests, projects, homework.