In Traction

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Updated Uiml.net homepage

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

New homepage for Uiml.net

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.

Linus Torvalds talk about git @ Google

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.

Announcing PydgetRFID

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:

PydgetRFID: GUI

And this a screenshot showing the communication between the daemon and the GUI logged with dbus-monitor:

PydgetRFID: using the the daemon and GUI

More information can be found at the PydgetRFID homepage.

WoSSIoT’07 paper accepted

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.

FOSDEM 2007

Last Sunday I went to FOSDEM. Saw some interesting talks, but from a presenting point of view, the talks of the two Mexican guys were the best

The videos of the presentations are available for download.

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