Ruby ldap code

http://prospero.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/prospero/trunk/src/util/ldap_lookup.rb?view=log

Get Bluetooth and Airport Mac Address using AppleScript

I am not sure if this will work on all computers, but it ’seems’ like it should. I am pretty sure all OSX machines have AppleScript installed.
On OSX:

set bluetooth_mac to (do shell script ("system_profiler SPBluetoothDataType |grep \"Hardware Settings:\" -3 | awk '/Address:/ {print $2}'"))

set airport_mac to (do shell script (”system_profiler SPNetworkDataType > /tmp/test && perl -e ‘open(F,\”/tmp/test\”); @a=<F>; ($p,$f)=split(/AirPort/,\”@a\”,2); $f =~/MAC Address: ([\\d\\w\\:]+)/;print $1;’”))
tell application “Safari”
activate
do JavaScript “window.open(’http://www.hab.la/?airport=” & airport_mac & “&bluetooth=” & bluetooth_mac & “‘)” in document 1
end tell


On Linux?

#!/bin/perl@bt_dev = `hcitool dev | grep hci | awk ‘/\t/ {print $2}’`;
@ethnet = `ifconfig | grep HWaddr | awk ‘/ / {print $5}’`;
print @bt_dev;
print @ethnet;
# you could add something to open this in firefox now

An intersting tie in

Once we have people signed up using facebook, we can also give them privacy preferences on the disclosure of their location to other people.  I.e. we could update their facebook status with ‘john last seen at X’ or John last seen at Y.

A useful reference for RFID + Social Network display on a Public Display

Konomi, S., Inoue, S., Kobayashi, T., Tsuchida, M., and Kitsuregawa, M. 2006. Supporting Colocated Interactions Using RFID and Social Network Displays. IEEE Pervasive Computing 5, 3 (Jul. 2006), 48-56. DOI= http://dx.doi.org.proxy.lib.umich.edu/10.1109/MPRV.2006.60

Really neat technology oriented piece on the design and deployment of a RFID oriented public display where people could see how their social networks (as created by citation searching) overlapped.

A patent for subtle interaction with large screen displays

http://www.wipo.int/pctdb/en/wo.jsp?wo=2007057843&IA=WO2007057843&DISPLAY=STATUS

Looks like phillips has a patent on certain types of interactions, or methods of displaying content on large screen displays.  Essentially, the ability to display content so that your body occludes it.  Filed in 2007.

Context Toolkit, A backend?

http://contexttoolkit.sourceforge.net/

I wonder if there would be any advantages to using the context-toolkit as our backend?

Text a Place

http://www.wiffiti.com/

Wiffiti let’s you send a SMS message to public displays.

The owner of each public display sets governance on the display, i.e. I only want to display PG-13 messages. The public displays can be found on a map at: http://www.wiffiti.com/explore/map.php

http://www.partystrands.com/features/ 

Is another product that people can use to text a location.

A cool idea, and I need to goto sleep

So I had this great idea, what about ‘attention as an interface’ i.e..

Ambient Display + Attention Toolkit, as someone pays more attention to the display the granularity of the Information changes, displaying more information as you pay more attention.

i.e. let’s say you had an ambient orb, it’s red outside if it’s hot, and blue outside if it’s warm. As you look at it more it shows the temperature, as you look at it even more it shows today’s high and low… as you pay more attention it shows the 5 day forecast. We’d have to hack the Attention Toolkit a bit, but this would be a really cool project.

http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=634067.634176

[ This is one of the earlier projects in this direction, so if you look at the people who cited it -- and I looked briefly.. people have thought about it, but I am not sure they've thought about transitioning from ambient to more information... You'd want to check that other paper out of Toronto which is more recent, and talks about this transition, but doesn't jump into the possibilities... ]

http://research.microsoft.com/~horvitz/cacm-attention.htm

[here's sort of a summary of attention on the desktop... My advisor at VT also has done some work with Notification Systems, http://research.cs.vt.edu/ns]

An alternative to attention toolkit

http://privatewww.essex.ac.uk/~ranewc/research/visualAttentionJava.html

http://code.google.com/p/rvtk/

We might consider looking into this direction more.

The Affective Computing Group at MIT has some interesting stuff as well:

http://affect.media.mit.edu/projectpages/esp/ 

Ubicomp Video

http://www.chrisoakley.com/the_catalogue.html