SJSU Computer Engineering Project Exposition

Computer Engineering graduates at San Jose State University showed off their projects yesterday. I had interesting conversations with several of the students and very much enjoyed the day.

A project called Green Solutions had a laptop controlling the angle of the window blinds to minimize use of the home heater or air conditioner. As the room gets warmer, the blinds close. Their plan is to have the temperature in every room of the house monitored wirelessly and the blinds in every room of the house controlled wirelessly.

Other green projects also were presented, and several projects to assist health care professionals were shown.

Another project I enjoyed was a performance comparison between RoR and Java. The presenter had, among other things, spoken with a couple of people from Joyent at the 2007 JavaOne conference. Joyent are big users of RoR and Solaris ZFS and Zones.

Digression: Ben Rockwood of Joyent presented at JavaOne 2007 on OpenSolaris. Here is the description of his presentation:

Lots of operating systems are available to you, but how do you decide which to use? What are the pros and cons? As a developer, do you really care? This presentation discusses the OpenSolaris operating system and why it isn't a platform to simply run your applications on but, rather, a natural extension of your development environment. The OpenSolaris OS is free and commercially backed; sports a large user base and community; is open-source, highly observable, mature, and stable; and is driving the cutting edge in operating system design. Technologies such as ZFS and Dynamic Tracing (DTrace) aren't just for sysadmins; rather, savvy developers can easily leverage the best aspects of the operating system to improve the experience your application delivers and to speed deployments. Security such as role-based authentication and Solaris Auditing; resource control such as Zones, memory, and CPU capping; and much more all enhance your deployment. Put a large developer community behind it that is passionate about Java technology and Sun projects such as the GlassFish project; Mustang; and Java Platform, Enterprise Edition (Java EE) 5, and you have a winning combination.

Thank you, Ben, and good luck to all the SJSU Computer Engineering graduates!

Posted at 09:21PM Dec 09, 2007 by alta in General  |  Comments[2]