In Traction

July 30, 2007

Vibrantink colorscheme might end up in Ubuntu

Neil Wilson contacted me about the Vibrantink colorscheme for Vim I created a while ago based on John Lam’s settings. He wanted to include it in the vim-rails package, which might be distributed with Ubuntu Gutsy, the next release of the Ubuntu Linux distro.

The vim-rails package is a collection of vim scripts that make editing Rails applications much easier. Neil also included another Vibrantink clone for Vim: vividchalk by Tim Pope, the author of rails.vim.

Here is a comparison between the original TextMate color scheme, vibrantink.vim and vividchalk.vim. Vibrantink.vim is less colorful than vividchalk but it resembles the original TextMate theme the most, although it applies the wrong color to the class method attr_reader.

I would like to have good syntax highlighting for other languages besides Ruby (e.g. C# and LaTeX) in the future. Who knows, when I find some spare time …

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)