Week 10 (4/6/2012) Spring 2012

Week 10 (4/6/2012) Spring Semester

We had yet another hectic week - On Wednesday, we had Undergraduate Research Symposium. RCOS was well represented in poster sessions as well oral presentations (at least 4 in each category). I had hard time in recognizing most of them as they are well suited(!), tied(!) and dressed. :)

On Friday we had a phantom "fireworks" (false fire alarm in JEC with 7 or 8 fire engines coming to help) just before our talks started. All of the students have to go out and brave the cold wind blowing across. To start with we did not have many students (as many of them left for Easter Holidays) and the fire drill drove a few back home. A few, proud ones remained and we had our own "fireworks" of talks!.

This week, we had three talks.

1) Shawn Denbow - Dr. Memory http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/dr-memory/

2) Colin Rice - BitHopper http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/bithopper/

3) Jinzhen Gong, Jeff Hui - Yacs http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/timetable/

Shawn is doing a meticulous job of reverse engineering system calls. He is documenting the calls API. He has almost completed his original goal.

Colin is cleaning up his server code and doing it in a separate branch. His software is used by many (quite a few - the actual count is unknown)

Jinzhen (and Jeff) talked about their YACS 2 release. They have one developer to help them with their project. The statistics (of their software usage) they showed is pretty impressive.

With the semester slowly winding down, every one is busy with school work and other end of the year activities. I am impressed with all the work RCOS students are doing.

Week 7(3/9/2012) Spring 2012

Week 7(3/9/2012) Spring 2012

With Spring Break looming ahead and with students taking a well deserved break, RCOS students continue to attend our meeting. This not only shows their dedication but also indicates their joy in sharing their wisdom and helping others!

We have three talks this week:

1) Brian Le, Patrick Teague, Alex Freska - Flowur
http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/flowur/

2) Jinshen Gong (Jeff Hui) - YACS http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/timetable/

3) Sunil Kunnakat, Brian Barnes - Android Music Sampler
http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/android-music-sampler/

Brian, Patrick and Alex (all freshmen) gave an excellent presentation of their FlowUR - an easy to draw Floawchart. They made very good progress and showed a Demo. Their current system uses Flash (may get changed to Javascript), PHP and a databse. They plan to produce both static and dynamic flowcharts (with zoom), svg, png and print out put. My only wish is that they write more blog posts - this may enable others to learn and use what they have accomplished.

Jinshen and Jeff talked about the improvements/code refactoring of YACS. Jinshen is working on the backends while Jeff is working on the front end. They are getting their system ready for Fall/Summer Registration. Current YACS takes input from ROCS and catalog. They also have a clever display of schedules. So, students watch out for an interesting experience for the Fall/Summer Registration!

Sunil and Brian talked about Anodiod Music Sample - an open source app for quick and easy music-making. They know their project is a bit ambitious and they have a doable schedule They plan to incorporate the existing open source software projects to enable their music program. This group also need to update their blog - for others to learn what they have been doing.

Since two out of three groups have not been updating blogs, I will end this blog with a request:

Please, Pretty please update your blogs - People read and learn from your experiences.