Slow mac slow mail problem

I was wondering why typing was so slow in new Mail program on Lepoard on OS X- turns out that TimeMachine was turned on. I'm surprised this speeded typeing up. 

Cool on line logo website

Very nice  all done in javascript + canvas I'm told (could be wrong). 

Made me realise that this was an form of embodied programming... 

on the good idears front

Paul had a fantastic one which is too exciting to blog about - I must go and check the physics people out to see what they can advise/loan. 

Jeff had a good one to we where discussing the source of noise on the the DTouch table. He said it was electrical noise over the power I said it was background radiation. I pulled the laptop powercable out to prove it and when I did so the noise disappeared from the DTouch signal. Looks like if we could suppress the noise on the power-supply we could get much better recognition without getting into clever signal processing. 

Jeff reminded me it is less than a month be for UIST so I better get a move on with the floor stickies too.

day of good ideas (AKA squeak rant)

The PC died in transit to the show. Jeff wants to use this as an excuse to get USB connection working to table. The down side is that he wants to make it work in smalltalk (in fact more specifically in squeak). I'm quite the cosmopolitan when it comes to computer languages but I'm not sure I want to stick to a ghetto language with out any specific reason to do so apart from Jeff's reluctance to learn anything else. I can hardly blame him, I've seen people resolutely stick to the first language they learnt over a 30 year carrier in computing. 

I love changing languages but have recently come to the conclusion that the reason I change languages is to get access to some new cool library (compiler writers please take note) that lets me code something neat up quick. That said I'm about to go back to C++ to use the open computer vision library but open computer vision is in desperate need of a significantly well written user guide. 

So my research in the next few weeks will lie either with signal processing signals from the diamond touch table or doing real time video processing for gesture recognition and we should do this all in squeak because it is good at using the multimedia processing features (oddly no), you can deliver double click-able applications that conform to the operating system  interface standard that the non programmers on the team can use(no), that lots of people can reuse our library (no), that we can make the program open source by integrating it on to source forge. Basically there is no clear reason to my mind to program this in smalltalk any more than there is a reason to program this in visual basic. 

I'm open to the case to use smalltalk but I need something distinctive that smalltalk has that I can't find anywhere else (translation give me a USP). Don't get me wrong small talk is a good tinkers language, if you out put are papers to conferences rather than code that other people can use( which is the life of an academic so I don't think Jeff is badly trained)  then small talk is the way to go. But I'm not sure this is my or the projects context. 

hobby research page ranking == degree

Hi - Here is one I came up with to night. I know I've always been quite dismissive of that paper on page ranking ( the kind google does to figure out how to rate things) in the GIS journal as a cheap way to do a naff syntax rip-off with out referencing the social logic of space. I basically assumed that the page ranking algorithm would produce the same kinds of output as integration or at possibly choice (sounds choicy when you here the algorithm). 

I was reading a new book on collective intelligence which explained the google page ranking algorithm and was curious enough to put it into webmap at home.  Doing this I was disappointed to find that page rank correlates well with (0.95) with connectivity / control and very badly integration(0.35)choice(0.77)/movement. 

This might not be true for small world graphs ( which axial maps are not). 

Thought I would include map of Barnsbury for your amusement. 

ill but good news

the table arrived but we have to supply our own acrylic and we have to sand the edges down. Looks like a bit of scientific equipment not a table (good and bad) looking forward to making it work should be able to get stuff working for Science fest. 

Tried projecting on to the sample of carpet of the new building and found can project white text on to black carpet. We had a quick session looks like we can combine wall projection (for images?) with floor projection. 

So I am back at work but feeling weak, Dr says it take it easy. 

The Everywhere Displays Project

The Everywhere Displays Project

I met this guy and loved to work - although before they had the camera attached.

I did like the way it made it possible to use a small projector over a large area.

The new building has a long entrance space that would be good to use a number of

movable mirror projectors might be good.

Looking at it I am inspired to think about a highly configurable space. Imagine a room

where the surfaces of projection can be reconfigured. So one large display splits into

two to become separate visualisations  or divides into 4 one for each participant.

Does provide a route for small amounts of high brightness light to be projected onto dark floor.

just came back from Xray - I wonder if you could improve the rates over breast cancer by

having a group of people looking at the image ala-xray of baggaged (the D-touch result).

bad news

two bits of bad news

the really bad news is that the floor of the new building will be near black - very hard to project text on to it. 

the second bad bit of news is that I have pneumonia and will be likely to be off work for a while. 

Eduserv Research Grants 2007-08

Eduserv Research Grants 2007-08

two ideas come up on this. 

1. the online identity - using key strokes to identify you. get money to help test. 

2. Open social graph - possibly some ubicomp table interaction with graph but need some educational angle.

 

3. Something about getting students to build software on line (webIDE) and getting them to build something but recording how 

they do this ( keep storing revisions). Use this to make sure they are the people doing.

4. Using ambient device to notice on line conversations use this to indicate actions.

web2 meets games

So much for my web2.0 meets games idea for mike 

Modelling4All

Computer modelling is playing an increasingly important role in fields as varied as sociology, epidemiology, zoology, economics, archaeology, ecology, climate, and engineering. This project, led by Ken Kahn and involving Howard Noble (both at the OUCS, University of Oxford), will attempt to make such modelling more widely accessible by developing easy to use Web 2.0 services for building, exploring and analysing models, encouraging the development of an on-line community where models and model components are shared, tagged, discussed, organised, and linked to other resources.  Furthermore, the project will explore the possibilities of providing an immersive first-hand experience of the execution of models within Second Life.