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EDM News

It’s been a while since my last post, so this is a quick update of what’s been happening lately.

On Monday and Tuesday the TAMODIA 2006 workshop was hosted at our institute. I joined a few interesting sessions. It was nice to meet again a lot of people I saw earlier this year at CADUI 2006. We also had an interesting keynote by Joëlle Coutaz.

Yesterday, my office mate Jan succesfully defended his dissertation, titled High-Level User Interface Models for Model-Driven Design of Context-Sensitive User Interfaces. So we can call him dr. Jan now

Johan Nulens joined the EDM team as well, and is now working in the Computer Graphics group.

VibrantInk theme for Vim

I came across a blog post from John Lam, the creator of RubyCLR. He made a rudimentary Vim color scheme based on VibrantInk by Justin Palmer. VibrantInk is a color scheme for the fabulous TextMate editor, and my personal favorite.

So I tried John’s version to make my Vim experience match up to TextMate’s in terms of eye-candy. It worked fine for GVim (the GUI version), but not in a plain terminal unfortunately.

I eventually discovered a great tutorial on how to convert GUI color schemes to 256 color terminal versions. After following the instructions and using some of the tools they provided, I managed to port it to the terminal.

The results (for Vim and GVim respectively):

VibrantInk Vim color scheme

VibrantInk Vim color scheme (GUI version)

The theme can be downloaded from the Vim website. Enjoy!

.NET YAML parser by two of our students

I meant to blog about this for some time now

First some background information: second year computer science students at our university are supposed to do a big project to enhance their programming skills and ability to work in teams. The students can suggest a project themselves, or choose a predefined one from a list provided by the teaching staff.

Around January, I submitted a proposal to write a YAML parser for .NET. There were a couple of YAML parsers available, but none for .NET. A secondary goal was to release the final product under an open source license.

Jonathan Slenders and Christophe Lambrechts chose to do the project. Under the guidance of Tom Van Laerhoven, they produced a working YAML parser, and released it under the LGPL. It was mentioned on the YAML homepage in June. Since then they have received quite some mails from people interested in using their library.

The project will soon be placed on SourceForge. Until then, more information (including a description of the parser’s algorithm and documentation) can be found at http://lumumba.uhasselt.be/~christophe/YAML/.

The code is available through CVS.


Edit: the project is now available on Sourceforge.

Fridays talks kickoff

Today Lode will give the first of a series of internal talks at our group. He will talk about multimodal interaction in virtual environments.

I’m looking forward to it, as these talks should be interesting to start some discussion.

My own talk will introduce semantic web technologies, and is due on September 8.

Poignant Ruby

A few days ago, I saved why the lucky stiff‘s Poignant Guide to Ruby as separate PDFs per chapter, and printed it out.

Whether you’re looking for a different programming language manual, or just want to read a motivating, well-written introduction to Ruby, the poignant guide is for you. It is pretty unique in its kind, although The Little Schemer and Casting SPELs in Lisp also sport a similar spirit of playfullness.

Nevertheless, that doesn’t mean the book only covers the basics. Chapter 6 for example, deals with juicy metaprogramming.

If you are interested in the PDFs, just let me know.

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