Takis referred me to a Google tech talk about git by Linus Torvalds.
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XpnKHJAok8]
Although I am more of a bzr advocate (for one because it’s easier to use, and fast enough for me), he gives a good explanation for the need for distributed revision control (which both bzr and git belong to).
Well worth a look.
I just released version 0.1 of PydgetRFID, the Python interface to the Phidgets Inc. RFID kit I blogged about earlier. It’s free software (licensed under the GPL). It wraps libphidgets with ctypes to talk to the hardware.
The software is now more polished and additionally provides a D-Bus service that allows other applications (written in any language with D-Bus bindings) to use the hardware. Currently this means you can connect to the hardware from Python, Ruby, .NET, C, C++, Perl and Pascal!
This DBUS service allows to start and stop reading, and emits a signal whenever a different tag (including the nil value) is read. I modified the original PyGTK GUI to use this daemon for communicating with the hardware. Furthermore, I improved the HAL support so that plugging the device in and out is detected. Unfortunately, the daemon cannot yet handle this though. That’s for a next release
Here is the GUI (which you probably remember from the last post). Nil values are now colored red:
And this a screenshot showing the communication between the daemon and the GUI logged with dbus-monitor:
More information can be found at the PydgetRFID homepage.
On Monday I got the notification that our submission for WoSSIoT’07 was accepted. This means I have to travel to Lisbon and Salamanca (for EIS 2007) in the same week
The paper is titled Tangible Mashups: Exploiting Links between the Physical and Virtual World. More details on my publications page.
A preliminary program for EIS 2007 is online. I will be presenting in the session on Models for Reasoning from 09:00 to 13:00 on Saturday, March 24.
We sent in the camera-ready version of our paper yesterday, after an unpleasant experience with trying to convert our original LaTeX version to a Word document. Fortunately, it took us less time than expected thanks to Yves who wrote a few Word macros to help with the conversion.
I’m looking forward to the conference. The list of accepted papers seems interesting.