Week 3 September 24, 2010

Week 3 September 24 2010

Our Fall RCOS group is going in full swing. All the students are active, vocal and interested in contributing to Open Source Community. I am fortunate to witness the energy and am glad some of their vibrant energy gets transferred to me. I wish other faculty members participate in RCOS, contribute and learn.

Here is a picture of the attentive students listening to a talk.



We had talks by

1) Nate Stedman and Rob Carr

2) Colin Sullivan, Adam Georgiou, Josh Elser (Alumni), Mike Pinkowish (co-op) and Chris Butler

3) Peter Hajas

4) Tim McMullan and Tom Rozanski

5) Michael O'Keefe

All the talks are jaw dropping and wonderfully presented. How else can you explain undergraduate students hanging on a Friday afternoon past 5:00 pm listening to talks!

Nate and Rob are continuing with their work on Ease - Presentation software for Gnome. They are planning to release version 0.4 soon. Nate and Rob are planning to include many plugins to Ease (some of the audience suggestions include plug in to direct twitter feed, plugin to latex to write scientific and technical presentations)

Colin, Adam and Chris presented their concert Sound Organizer useful for a local band members to collaborate and discuss songs. They have a prototype working already. They are doing bug fixes and are planning on utilizing emerging technologies (such as HTML5 and SVG). Their system is awesome and will be useful to musicians who would like to collaborate. Their talk slides may be found by clicking here.

Peter, being an apple fan, is working on a non-obtrusive mechanism for IPhone notification. His presentation was awesome (like every one else this week). Peter knows people who worked on similar systems before. Peter has made a preliminary implementation of his system and a Photoshop of his GUI. A RCOS member suggested Peter to make some of his functions (to create Mobile Notification Application) in a open source library - to enable others to create some other other applications.

Tim and Tom are continuing with their Awesome wave project. Their project is to a part of a stenography project (to code data in a music file without losing the sound quality of the music). Tim and Tom have created a prototype already. They are planning to package, fix the bugs, try with other music file formats and different compression schemes for the data.

Mike is continuing with his CAGE( chronos) project. His project is to create gestures and control using gestures some of the computer applications (including him to move presentation slides by gesture etc - As Eric, an earlier project member aptly mentioned that this project is a minority report style for common men) Mike will package CAGE system for TI wrist watch. His next task is to make his system work with Androids and release it to the market. He is also planning to make CAGe work with Windows. My dream of doing air math may be realized with his android application (at least that is my thinking).

Please look at the dashboard (http://dashboard.rcos.cs.rpi.edu ) to learn more details about their projects. As usual I learned a great deal after listening to these talks.

week 2.5 Wednesday 22, 2010

I want to share the RCOS group photo taken last week. You can see a fine group of eager and energetic students waiting to write open source code to do useful things.

Week 2 September 17, 2010

Week 2 September 17, 2010

Most of the students have chosen their projects and have started making headway into their projects. We had four talks this week - three by students and we had a guest speaker from dotCIO office Will Gill (Will has worked on RCOS projects during past semesters).

We had presentations by
1) John McMaster
2) Will Gill
3) Alex Radocea
4) Graylin Kim

John Mcmaster's project is universal de-compiler by force - John is continuing his work on open source tools for reverse engineering. In particular he wants to pursue scanning for licenses in source code - John has learnt enough Qt to create a GUI front end for his decompiler - He hopes that having a gui will add more usability to his system. His talk slides may be found in



Will Gill talked about geo cordinates features of HTML 5. Will has building a lot of web applications for dotCIO office. One of the applications he is building is to show points of interest close to where one is. Will had a nice demo with IPad which showed wikipedia articles close to JEC building. Will will post some of his sample code on the web for others to look at.

Alex talked about his touch math (interactive) project. His project is manipulate math equations on the fly and get results. To illustrate if you want to expand(x+y) ² all you need is to pull this apart - what one does with IPhone/Android for expanding icons. Alex's ideas are very cool and can be an excellent tool set for Scientists. His talk may be found here.

Digiti - MultiTouch Equation Editor - The Concept on Prezi

Graylin Kim talked about his work with Open Legislation and NY State Open Government Project. In his past work, he has provided API and search capabilities. Now he wants his system to be used by other state governments. Graylin's work and others work will form a stepping stone for democracy - transparency of government and bring power to ordinary citizens.
His talk may be found here.

Rcos fall 2010

View more presentations from GraylinKim.

It was an enjoyable and educative experience for me as usual - I learned a lot. Students at RCOS are motivated and dedicated to make their project a success.

Please update the dashboard if you have not already done so.

Week 1 Sptember 10, 2010

We have an enthusiastic and bright students on our first meeting for the fall semester in JEC 3117. We have had a few new faces and glad to have a few returning veterans. Most of the students have chosen their projects - some are their own, some are continuing with their projects, some are choosing to work on HFOSS, some on Open Government and soem to help with local community.

As usual, my plea is to request the students to update the dashboard (right only two projects are on line).

We had two guest speakers the first week:

1) David Dora
2) Alex Rodacea

David is a graduate student at ECSE department (he got his BS from RPI) and he talked about open content. His pleas is to contribute to Open Book project (specifically 50 to 60 pages book) with explicit idea, outline, details and examples. His talks slides may be found here.



Alex's general theme was reverse engineering. In particular, Alex talked about his summer exploits (with his two team members (one from Germany and one from Korea)) winning $10000 in a Security Contetsts conducted in connection with a security conference in Montreal Canada in 2010. Alex gave an over all summary of his his exploits and he had a few specific slides. He talked about the two common security holes in Software (namely comparison with signed numbers and with initialized variables). He gave clever examples of these kinds of mistakes and how people exploit these.

Alex is willing to chat with anyone about these problems. His slides may be found here.
Alex's slides

Week 1(2).6180339887 (8/20/2010)

Week 1(2).6180339887 (8/20/2010)

It was indeed a golden (ratio) week with an unconference of NY State Government Open Source efforts held at the Legislative building at Albany, NY. With an enlightened NY State senate CIO, NY state government has been going full steam with their open source efforts. Like whitehouse , the ny state senate is going the open source drupal (version 6) way (with web 2.0 technology). NY State legislative offices provide open API to get to the legislative data. All the conferences were streamed live and archived. Please visit this site to get more information (if you are interested in getting involved).

The NY State CIO is all for open source software efforts. You can watch him in this youtube video. One of the leading tech employees at the CIO office is a RPI alumni and hence provides greater opportunity for RCOS students involvement.

One of the summer 2010 RCOS students, Graylin Kim worked with NY State CIO office to get some of these efforts moving forward. In fact he was mentioned as a super intern!

This link gives the detailed program of the barconference.

During the first day there was a developers workshop where people talked about the current projects and what they have accomplished. You can see in this photo Graylin giving his talk.



I learned a lot from attending these talks (remotely) through live streaming.

On Friday, I attended the unconference (or barconference) - We had key note talks by NY State CIOS (Andrew Hoppin, Dr. Melodie Strawberry-Stewart, Rico Singleton) as well as an enlightening talk by a grass root manager Philip Ashlock.

This was followed by various small discussion groups:
I attended their drupal efforts, what should be in the IT policy of the next governor, NYState thruway system and open video. I learned a lot of things from these talks. Accessibility of web and accessibility of data were discussed at length.

The following were some of the useful links that I could jot down.

State thruway (traffic, transit)

CIO OFT

openplans

percentmobile

drupalgardens

open 311

open 511Municipality

On a lighter vein I can put a tick mark to a column saying that I too attended a bar conference!

All in all it was a worthwhile event and very useful too!

Week 12 - Final Day of the Final Presentations

Week 12: (8/13/2010)

One of the cool things for me to be associated with RCOS (http://rcos.rpi.edu ), is the helpful attitude of many people (students, fellow faculty members and staff members). As I was recovering from a bad case of cold, I could not attend our last meeting. Two outstanding people one student (Brian Michalski) and one faculty member (Dr. Robert Ingalls) came to my rescue. Both of them are superb in not only on technical things that they do, but also know how to manage and how to help in a gentle manner. I am extremely thankful to both of them.

I will be remiss if I do not acknowledge the excellent work of summer 2010 RCOS students. They rose to the challenge and did an outstanding work.

This week, we had talks by

1) Graylin Kim
2) Matthew O'Brien
3) Anthony Loven and Brittany Jason
4) Sean Austin, Diana Mazzola and Griffin Milsap
5) Jacob Katz

Jason Zallinger could not attend. His talk may be found in
Final talk (powerpoint with audio)

Joe Dougherty could not attend. He is making pitch for his system to various fire departments. He promises to be present during our Fall Poster presentation.

Brian Michalski has given a succinct summary of the talks in his blog. Thanks Brian.

Thanks to Rob Escriva for creating IRC for RCOS - That provided a fertile ground for speedy technical exchanges. Thanks to Eric Allen for keeping our dashboard alive and thriving from California!

Hoping to see many of you for the Fall RCOS projects! Keep coding and producing excellent open source software.

Week 11 - More Cool Presentations

Week 11: (8/6/2010)

Time flies when you are working with a fine group of young and energetic student with creative ideas. The summer is almost over (next week will be our last week).

We had presentations by


1) Nicholas Steele
2) Stephen Trombelli and James McMillan
3) Ryan Dignard
4) Ryan Baltazar and Ben Shippe
5) Michael O'Keefe,

Nick had made very good progress with his vote box project. He completed his ballot (with Qt) and most of the back end and GUI software. He plans to build a hardware prototype for his project next and hopefully our next RPI union election may utilize his hardware and software.

Steve and James talked about their Sahana-Eden project (part of HFOSS project). They have completed the system installation software. They are getting feedback from system administrators and incorporating their suggestions in their system. Next step is to get more testing and launching their with the next release.

Ryan D has almost completed his donor database system. He has added anonymous contribution in his system (thanks to the suggestion of fellow RCOS students during his previous presentation). He needs to do more testing. He is also trying to see whether his software could be done under the WAX PHP framework of Joe Ch (done last year as a RCOS project).

Ryan B and Ben has almost completed their installation of map server The time consuming portion of their sever is the tile generation of maps. They showed a quick demo of their server. they are documenting the installation instruction, creating a wiki etc. They hope to finish this before the end of this summer.

Mike gave a very cool presentation of this gesture creation/recognition software with his watch. His software runs on apple hardware and Mike is trying to make it work under other operating systems. Mike is also planning to release a library package for his gesture recognition/creation software.

All in all, the talks and the projects are very interesting. I do hope that others at RPI and elsewhere notice our efforts in making this world a better place.