Jo Vermeulen

July 24, 2007

DIPSO 2007 paper accepted

The paper we submitted to DIPSO 2007 (a workshop at this year’s Ubicomp conference) has been accepted.

Title: Making Bits and Atoms Talk Today – A Practical Architecture for Smart Object Interaction

Authors: Jo Vermeulen, Ruben Thys, Kris Luyten and Karin Coninx

Abstract:
Bringing together the physical and digital worlds has been the subject of research for some time now. In particular, a number of successful prototypes that link physical objects with digital information (often called smart object systems) have already been presented. However, a generally accepted architecture to design such systems has not yet emerged. This paper presents a reusable and practical framework for developing smart object applications today. At the basis of our approach lies the use of Semantic Web technology to drive interaction between the physical and digital worlds. We used this framework
to develop SemaNews, a novel application that combines the advantages of digital news feeds with those of physical newspapers. We prove that our architecture is reusable by building a second prototype in a different application domain: STalkingObjects implements the basic components of a store of the future.

Venue and date: Innsbruck, Austria, September 16, 2007

June 28, 2007

Annoyances while creating Visual Studio projects for Uiml.net

I am currently moving Uiml.net towards MSBuild files (a.k.a. Visual Studio project files) and experienced a few problems such as a restriction with Compact .NET’s OpenFileDialog.

After a bit of Googling, I finally know why I can’t seem to get the OpenFileDialog to look for files in \Program Files: it was just designed that way (do a quick search for OpenFileDialog on that page). Apparantly they wanted to help users organize their files, by restricting them to the \My Documents folder. Too bad they didn’t think of what developers might want to do … I want to allow people to try UIML examples when they click the “Select UIML file” button. Of course these files reside in the Uiml.net application directory itself, so I need to allow them to pick a file outside of the My Documents folder. If that wasn’t bad enough, it further restricts you to one level of subfolders within the My Documents folder!

I also noticed MSBuild has no nice way of copying a file to another path than the one it is being referenced from. I orginally wanted to copy the front-end files and vocabularies in the root directory where the Uiml.net executable is placed. Since I didn’t find a solution, I made dedicated directories for these files, and modified the code to look for them in those directories instead.

If I could tell MSBuild to copy a file to another path, I could also solve the OpenFileDialog problem just by copying the Uiml.net examples to the My Documents folder, while the rest of the application would stay in the Program Files folder.

So my (hackish) solution is now to copy all examples first into a direct subfolder of the user’s My Documents folder. Not very elegant, but it works.

June 23, 2007

Google Scholar library search and BibTeX links

After looking into the preferences of Google Scholar, I found out that it’s possible to let it search our university’s public library (providing access to Scientific American, Springer LNCS, etc.). I just had to enter “Hasselt University”, and could add it as a library link. Another useful option is to have it provide links to BibTeX citations.

June 12, 2007

Stacks in Mac OS X Leopard

Lots of new features in Mac OS X Leopard, but Stacks is one that I would definitely use.

Everyone has had a messy desktop once in a while. The desktop is just the most convenient place to store stuff you are working on right now. To solve this, Leopard allows you to create stacks which are collections of files, programs or folders. For example, Safari automatically creates a Downloads stack where it puts downloaded files so they won’t clutter your desktop anymore.

Incidentally, I just read a paper by Thomas W. Malone titled How Do People Organize Their Desks? Implications for the Design of Office Information Systems, which clearly says computer systems should take advantage of the fact that people naturally organize their work in piles (or stacks)

May 22, 2007

Updated Uiml.net homepage

I spent some time yesterday to update the Uiml.net homepage:

We set up a wiki somewhere last year to provide more information about our UIML research. However, since Uiml.net is the main focus of our research efforts, I reorganized the wiki to be more of a homepage for Uiml.net, while still listing our publications.

I am hoping to migrate all the content of the old website (still located at Kris’ homepage) to the wiki soon.

Lately I have been enjoying Launchpad for hosting my projects and Bazaar branches. It has integrated specifications (blueprints), bug tracking, and a forum (answers). I have moved Uiml.net over to Launchpad as well. Launchpad’s integration of Bazaar branches will be useful for managing multiple experimental contributions from myself, Kris or our Bachelor’s or Master’s students.

Finally I’m hoping to put out a more or less stable release of Uiml.net by September. More information can be found at Launchpad.