News

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More recent news are on our Facebook page.
March 2, 2010: We have a new URL: www.ProjectRhea.org (acquired from GoDaddy.com). Of course, all other links are still valid.

February, 2010: Chris and Zach are launching a WYSIWYG ( what you see is what you get) editor (basically a rich text editor) which will make editing Rhea pages much easier and much faster.Do check it out and provide us with feedback. There is also comment box that you may have noticed on the left hand side.

January, 2010: Zach will be leading a mediawiki training session on Monday January 18, 6-8pm in MSEE393. Anyone interested in learning how to better use Rhea should consider attending. Pizza will be provided. RSVP on our facebook wall or by emailing masonz at purdue dot you know where.

October 15, 2009: Rhea now has a facebook page, which should help us share our news more efficiently. We already have two fans!!! Who wants to be the third?

September 26, 2009: We now have a second writer-in-residence. His name is Dhruv Lamba and he has already contributed a pretty cool page on image interpolation. We are looking forward to reading Dhruv's future contributions. Many thanks to the Motorola Foundation for sponsoring Dhruv.

September 25, 2009: Rhea now has a writer-in-residence. His name is Dave Knott. We "met" Dave through his contributions for the course MA 460, including a very interesting page on Goedel's theorem. We were quite impressed by the quality and originality of his posts and decided that we would like to encourage him to contribute even more material to Rhea. This gave us the idea of a writer-in-residence program. Many thanks to the Motorola Foundation for sponsoring Dave.

August 25, 2009: Some people reported issues with the upper bar menus when using IE6 and IE7. These should be fixed now. Thanks Zach!

August 12, 2009: The dropbox feature is now pretty much done. Based on Katie Bouman's suggestion, Zach has added the possibility to drop files into one's own dropbox. This enables users to store files and retrive them later from the web. This should be a really useful feature. Great idea Katie!!

August 12, 2009: Zach has added three short cuts in the right side-bar. The "create a new page" link should help people who have never used a wiki get started at creating their own pages. The "create a new course" link can be used to create a semester+instructor specific course page. It takes care of the course category creation and definition, so now creating a new course should be straightforward. The third link called "create a child page" was created to take care of the problem of associating pages with their corresponding course. Rhea uses categories to tag pages with appropriate course labels. For this to work, every course needs to be associated with a unique category (so it can be distinguished from courses with the same title offered by other instructors in other semesters). Then every page that belongs to a given course needs to be put into the category of that course. A "child page" is a page that inherits all the categories of its parent (the page you are currently viewing when you click the "create a child page" link). It also automatically gets a return link to its parent page. Of course, all of the corresponding source code can be modified later while editing if needed. As always, comments are welcome.

August 5, 2009: We just got our first reference/review on Stumbleupon. See here. The actual review is about this page with a great aliasing example.

August 5, 2009: You can now access your dropbox directly from the "User" tab (once you are logged in).

July 28, 2009: We are currently experimenting with a new "drop box" feature for electronic file (e.g., homework) collection. It is a new mediawiki extension that is being developed by Zach Mason. If you are logged in, you can click here to visit your personal dropbox. Click here to visit Zach's dropbox. We are interested in getting your feedback regarding this new feature.

July 15, 2009: We just deployed a new Rhea feature called "liaisons". Click here to learn more about the liaison feature. If you have feedback about liaisons, please write it here.)

july 15, 2009: We just installed a google powered search engine on the right. This enables you to search pages based on content. This new tool complements the old search tool (on the right-hand side of the black bar on top of the page), which allows you to search for page names and categories. I guess we will have to change the text on the buttons slightly to clear the confusion between the two types of searches.

July 14, 2009: The Math Department newsletter is talking about us (see p. 14 of this newsletter). To see the Rhea page about Leibniz's slowly converging series that is mentioned in the article, click here.

May, 2009: Zach updated the page printing tool. Now when you print a Rhea page, you should be able to see everything including equations. As always, feedback is appreciated. Please use this page to list issues.

May, 2009: Zach finished the transfer of the remaining pages from the Old Kiwi as an exercise in learning Rhea for future work. The courses transferred include ECE662 Spring 2008,, ECE637 Spring 2008, and MA544 Summer 2008 study group.

April 1, 2009: Rhea is now Internet Explorer 6 compatible, thanks to student volunteer Chris Humbert. A big thank you Chris!

February 23, 2009: Rhea has had more then 50,000 page views since the beginning of the Semester (January 12, 2009).

February 19, 2009: Check out the new Help Page with screen shots created by Nate Orlow.

Setting up the Rhea Development Lab (MSEE393), February 2009.
February 18, 2009: The Rhea Development Lab (MSEE393) is now open! The walls have been painted and we have received three new iMacs thanks to the Motorola Foundation Grant. (See the picture on the right. ) We are currently working on upgrading the furniture and decorating the space. And we have a brand new coffee machine!

January 29, 2009: Thanks to the effort of Deen King-Smith, we now have the URL www.purdue.edu/rhea.

January 16, 2009: Project Rhea was awarded a $50,000 grant from the Motorola Foundation!!!

January 12, 2009: Stephen Rudolph just installed a syntax highlighting extension. It's a great tool to display code and supports just about any language, including C and MATLAB. You can see an example here.

January 12, 2009: The "recent changes by category" function has been enabled. You can use it to list the changes that relate to a specific course. Here is how.

January 12, 2009: The new design has been deployed. A big thank you to Dennis Snell, Mike Walker, Ben Brame and the rest of the development team! We are now using Purdue colors to emphasize the fact that this is a purdue-wide resource.

January 12, 2009: The content from the different databases used last semester has been merged into a single database for easier browsing and better scalability. Thanks to Ben Brame for writing the scripts and taking care of the merge!

November 6, 2008: Dennis Snell and Mike Walker created a new skin with Purdue's color scheme. It's been deployed on Prof. Boutin's ECE301 wiki and Prof. Bell's MA181 wiki. Your comments are welcome!

October 17, 2008: Ben Laskowski's first ECE301 homework page has been viewed more than 323 times so far.

October 10, 2008: If you google for "Purdue Rhea", our site is now the first item on the list. Yeah!!

September 2008: There was an article on Kiwi in the summer 2008 edition of the ECE impact magazine.

August 2008: Because of a name conflict, we have to rename Kiwi. Beginning this Semester, this site is going to be called "Rhea".

News - Rhea