Ambient Agora Homepage January 31, 2008

The Ambient Agora project has pretty much died off. But, they have a few more papers on the work at their project website: http://www.ambient-agoras.org/
There is a movie of the system in action at:
http://www.ipsi.fraunhofer.de/ambiente/paper/2004/AmbientAgoras_MPEG2_prante.avi 

Interactive Public Ambient Display January 31, 2008

There’s a guy at Toronto who built a pretty awesome public ambient display, and also tried to emphasize a few zones of interaction.
http://www.nonsequitoria.com/v.php?s=research&f=interactive_public_ambient_displays&i=phases.gif
I don’t know if he’s still working on it, as his CV hasn’t been updated in a while.

Fun quote on BT January 31, 2008

Back in 2005, when a journalist asked Steve Jobs if iPod would support BT headphones, a part of his reply was that Bluetooth is a technology in search of a problem. The comment struck in my mind as “BT is a solution in search of a problem”. IMHO BT has failed to live up to [...]

Traits of a PD January 31, 2008

Over the last couple of weeks I have been brainstorming different ideas for public display apps. I’ll put down some of the generic traits that were recurrent in my ideas. These ideas are also gleaned from the readings. None of the ideas are mutually exclusive, so many of the apps I imaged had a few [...]

Project Oxygen January 31, 2008

It would be worthwhile to take a look at Project Oxygen to get some context on work that’s been done in the past.

Finally Found a good Survey Article on Ubicomp Systems January 31, 2008

So I have been looking for a good survey article on Ubicomp Systems for a while, and I finally found one:
Endres, C., Butz, A., and MacWilliams, A. 2005. A survey of software infrastructures and frameworks for ubiquitous computing. Mob. Inf. Syst. 1, 1 (Jan. 2005), 41-80.
This is a great review article, simple, to the point, [...]

Publish-Subscribe for Sensor Networks January 30, 2008

I’ve been doing a good amount of research trying to figure out if the publish-subscribe model I have been working on for pervasive computing systems is novel in any way. So far it is at least novel in I can’t find anyone that has released source-code — so far. [correction I was wrong]
Papers [...]

Migrations And You! January 28, 2008

This week’s post from me to you is about migrations. “What are migrations,” you ask? They’re ways to update the schema of a database without actually touching icky SQL syntax. I actually like touching SQL, but if you don’t then migrations are the way to go! They’re also useful for keeping the changes of the [...]

Cell phone detector January 25, 2008

Cell phone detector

Cell Busters – Cell phone detection and prevention. detectors, blockers and jammers January 25, 2008

Cell Busters – Cell phone detection and prevention. detectors, blockers and jammers
I wonder if any of the old S60 phones can be reconfigured to do detection/location…