Last Wednesday, I participated in the fourth edition of the Vlaamse Programmeerwedstrijd (VPW), hosted by PHL in Hasselt. The VPW is a Flemish programming contest inspired by the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC). Participants compete in teams of 3 and are divided into three different categories: high school students (category I), undergraduate students (category II), and graduate students or professionals (category … Read more

Just read an interesting post on Albrecht Schmidt’s blog about the Australian conference and journal rankings. No big surprises in the list of course, but nevertheless interesting to have a look at. The problem (at least in Belgium) seems to be that the rankings used for university funding are focused mostly on journals. The top conferences are often only ranked slightly higher … Read more

I finally updated my homepage today. It used to be a custom Rails website, with RHTML views that I edited through SSH. I never got around to create a database model for my website, and to be frank, I am glad that I didn’t since my homepage’s structure changed a lot. On the other hand, having to login remotely and edit the view with Vim every … Read more

Research is to see what everybody else has seen, and to think what nobody else has thought. – Albert Szent-Gyorgyi (Hungarian Biochemist, 1937 Nobel Prize for Medicine, 1893-1986) I got the idea to document the way I read papers from a discussion with Lode (he uses mostly the same approach as I do). I’m pretty certain this … Read more

A few weeks ago I came across a blog post by Cati Vaucelle about Making Things Talk, the new book by Tom Igoe. The book deals with building smart, communicating things. It is built up out of specific projects and uses practical examples to explain different technologies. Tom works at NYU ITC (where Adam Greenfield also works). Through a series of simple projects, … Read more

I recently read an interesting CSCW 2008 paper by Wendy Ju: Range: Exploring Implicit Interaction through Electronic Whiteboard Design. She describes a framework for implicit interaction and applies it to the design of an interactive whiteboard application called Range.   The paper is situated in the field of ubiquitous computing. The goal of Mark Weiser’s vision of ubiquitous computing was calm computing, where calm reflects the … Read more

We received our new laptops this week. Since they support Bluetooth (just as about any laptop these days), I decided to experiment a bit with detecting nearby Bluetooth devices. A while ago I discovered PyBluez, an easy-to-use Python Bluetooth library by MIT PhD student Albert Huang. The nice thing about it is that it works both on GNU/Linux and Windows. … Read more

A while ago I noticed Jordan Mantha repeated my old bzr vs git benchmark. I was curious to see if things changed. It seemed that both systems have improved in speed, but there were no shocking results. There are some differences between our experiments though. Jordan wonders how long it took for me to commit my changes after … Read more

Apparently, Lode threw me a stick. So here is my contribution  Some hackers got Linux running on the Nintendo Wii:   The new Apple Macbook Air features a multi-touch trackpad, which you can see in action here:   And finally, a funny video about Bill Gates’ last day at Microsoft starring amongst others Matthew McConaughey, Jay-Z, Bono, Steven Spielberg, George … Read more

Kris pointed me to an interesting CHI 2008 paper: Reality-Based Interaction: A Framework for Post-WIMP Interfaces by R.J.K. Jacob, A. Girouard, L.M. Hirshfield, M.S. Horn, O. Shaer, E.S. Treacy, and J. Zigelbaum. Abstract: We are in the midst of an explosion of emerging human-computer interaction techniques that redefine our understanding of both computers and interaction. We propose the notion of Reality-Based Interaction (RBI) as a unifying concept that ties … Read more

I had some fun with Gary Bishop’s OpenCV Python wrapper this morning. I wanted to try out OpenCV for detecting faces using a web cam. This could be used for instance to see if someone is sitting behind his desk or not. I used Gary’s Python wrapper since I didn’t want to code in C++. I didn’t know where to start, … Read more

Just a quick update on my previous post. I hooked my code up to a D-Bus daemon, and used it to detect if I was sitting behind my desk or not. I had to position the camera a bit lower, because it would sometimes not recognize my face when I was looking at the bottom of my screen. … Read more