If you see my UROPs around please congratulate them!

Ralph Harik completed a guest book application (for his AUP and graduation-required credit no less) that combines live GPS readings with Wherehoo data retrieved live from the server via the handheld's wireless Internet connection... to access virtual "guest books" that can be sprinkled around the world. It runs on the Cassiopeia (thanks to Emily Chang for her work in researching the shortest path - and documenting it - to let us run Java applications on the Cassiopeia, and for working with me on the other nitty gritty details like serial port reading libraries).

Aleksandra Szelag did a great job on the Wherehoo server upgrade. Aleks also did a heck of a job putting Dublin data into Wherehoo so I could do a local demo of the Perisope back in January, and she's also created a test suite for the server so we can discover if future upgrades cause any problems with the server... a very important thing to have

Lee Lin and I collaborated on the infrastructure for a couple of large projects including the ever popular Periscope (two full revisions of the core I/O code). He also implemented a sturdy GPS-reading class that we co-designed, which Ralph is using to take location readings from the GPS receiver (it is a bit harder than just sucking data off the serial port - there are checksums that MUST be checked, validations over the data that have to happen etc)... sometimes building the inside is more thankless than making the outside, but it's vital. It's even worth staying up all night before demos, especially when things work out in the end! Lee was up with me until 3am the night before a very imporant demo last fall, bringing the first Periscope to life.

...and Sanjiv Parekh finished the EMALI public-key-swapping automatically-encrypting e-mail client (soon to be a personal e-mail proxy that works with any e-mail client) just in time for DL and EMarkets demos. Everything works as promised and as designed, great demo. Hopefully we will get some more exposure for this soon (once I'm clear of the thesis work) and we can get some discussions going about why e-mail client's don't all do this, and how they could.

All these folks came in with varied levels of skill in Java coding and not as much with the other weird stuff I threw at them (TINI boards, analog-digital I/O, interfacing to serial devices, cryptography, TCP/IP socket communications, threads, database connectivity, and more) and everyone hung in there and did a really nice job.... and hopefully learned a lot.

Awesome job, guys, and thanks for all the hard work. It has been great working with you.

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