I can has Video Chat?

Today we got Video chat working. It's a hack but it works and it's decent frame rate and you know what? It works! The rest of this week is going to be testing different flags and settings to optimize our frame rate and video quality.

Help from the Community

No blog post yesterday :( I forgot....sorry

Yesterday I polished our chat software a bit. We had an interesting day. Apparently there was some sort of art show fund raiser thing scheduled in the main room of the CSI. Unfortunately we also WORK in that room. It was quite interesting when I walked out to go to the bathroom and I come back and a woman is trying to tell me I'm not allowed back to my "office". We ended up clearing it up with the help of Remy and Professor Jacobs. It was really nice programming half the day with live music playing.

Today I pinged the community to try to find some advice about video streaming on the XO's. Surprisingly I got a lot of feedback. In the past I have gotten some sarcastic RTFM replies. Full transcript can be found here https://fedorahosted.org/pipermail/ovc/2010-March/000003.html. It turns out Collabora made the original Video Chat Activity. It also turns out it was mostly just a proof of concept. These guys seem really willing to help us out. They gave us a lot of good links and advice. I'm psyched to run this by Jlew and Fran and see what they make of it since I'm not very strong at network programming.

Well it's Friday. I'm off to do some rock climbing. Peace.

Biting into the Code

Today I finally got to sink my teeth into the code. I went wrote the code for displaying the chat dialog between the two users. That's 1 for 2 of our goals done this week. Hopefully now we can get the video streaming. Jlew is all over that figuring it out. Maybe we'll get some input at InterLockRoc tomorrow.

New Hardware!

Today we got some sick new hardware from 5Linx. They gave us twelve of their video phones. Remy and I had a fun adventure going to pick up the video phones. We got halfway there and Remy realized that he forgot what industrial park 5Linx was in. Luckily we found it eventually after exploring the labyrinth of parking lots and grey buildings. So we're going to play with this hardware and see if we can get our software working on it. This could be a very cool application of open source developing. I'm excited to see where this goes.

Coding Day 1

Today we started to dive into the code. First thing for the day: get the video working again on the 1.5's. When we updated the firmware on Thursday it changed how Sugar communicated with the webcam. Jlew got that working pretty fast. Then he started working on getting two xo's to communicate. I did some more work on foss.rit.edu since this was fairly over my head. Once we get these things communicating we can actually flesh out how we're going to design this whole program.

On a personal note... Over the weekend I went to New Jersey for a rock climbing competition with RIT's Rock Climbing Club. It was a ton of fun. I ended up placing 3rd and the team placed 2nd overall. Here's a video of me climbing at the comp.

Smoke testing this XO's

Today we smoke tested the XO's to make sure everything is running smooth. This included things like checking the webcam, mic, and mesh networking. Everything works without issue. The only thing we haven't tested yet is connecting to RIT's network. We've been in contact with ITS but they are proposing a non-ideal solution to connecting these to the net. They want us to use a console-level solution that requires us to keep our RIT screen name and password in a plain text file on the XO. The XO's are very insecure and no one on the development team is willing to put their login info on the computer. Today we also welcomed a new member to our team, Fran. He was originally working on the blocku team but decided to switch to our project.

Many of you might be wondering, "Taylor what happened to yesterday?". Okay so probably no one is wondering that :P. Yesterday I had a really awful stomach flu so I called in sick. After that I ended up working half a day anyways. We went and got our payroll stuff fixed. Hopefully I'll receive a paycheck eventually... We also had our first ASL class. That was a ton of fun. We learned the alphabet and how to count. We also started on some basic conversational stuff like greetings and farewells.

Fun stuff so far, hopefully we'll start diving into the foo soon.

New XOs:

Getting this Project on Trac

Today we added a ton of content to our Trac. We're adding all sorts of "non-programming" things so that the Trac not only shows our progress on the code but also shows the story behind the code.

Later, me and Jlew played with Ohloh.net. This website is DOPE. We added our projects including OVC and now it'll track our repo pushes.

If you're trying to follow us check out openinnovationrit on youtube. This is where all the foss videos are posted. Our weekly interviews will be going up on this account too.