self observation of the day

Just getting the new coffee table experiment working. 

While I was I noticed that if I  scroll using the apple touch pad then the text appears on the baby monitor. 

I wonder how long before  I noticed this going on. Interesting that I was able to associate between two completely separate and unrelated things.  Was it a sound/ action thing. Could I notice the same between vision and action more quickly? 

Ruby on rails

This isn't about Ubi-comp. I just needed somewhere to make notes about the rub  on rails course. 

the central concept is to see how fast and light we can make the production of a new course. IN this case we are producing 5 points post grade ( assume you can program ) course about ruby on rails. 

just had a short meeting about it. What did we conclude

1. Treat the book chapters as the basic units 

questions how quickly can we get students to go through the chapter. 

        What can we add ( additional material) 

2. Interests in deployment  -

 something not done in the book

       need something like Drupal to make mutiple sub domains with seperate version of apache.  

Agreed to talk in 2 weeks time after looking at book again.  

      

Some success

Tried a number of alternatives out and found that having tracing paper UNDER the acrylic top with nothing above does a good job when using portvideo of Open computer vision. 

This does track your finger but needs code to reject large blobs. 

Also had some improvement with the background subtraction for the floor/wall stickies project. 

screen thoughts

We got the Rectivision stuff working on the table with a flood light + diffuser over it + the using tracing paper over the acrylic. 

Getting close to making the table work well in FDIR mode. I think i need to have some baffles to stop the edges leaking light down. I've managed to make the dot go away by tilting the screen so finally I can try upping the threshold to make the work work. 

Also got the basics of floor stickies working and gave demo. 

Heard rumours of large 4M media wall in new building..  

Visit from City University

Just finished a demo to Dr Sara Jones and Professor Neil Maiden. They have a new Diamond touch table and where looking for people who had used them. 

I came in late ( working libary and lost time but Simon phoned me to remind me), but had a nice discussion about using tables/tangibles in the context of user interface elicitation. 

So this was the last in a row of three demos of the fishtable. 

Over lunch Neil mentioned having some contacts with web usability people and I mentioned my intreast in  finding click stream data AND eye tracking in games (apparently not done yet).

Mean while the wrong kind of silicon sheet was delivered - to thick and not squashy! Makes me wonder if working on the vision tracking is better approach. 

Next week are moving buildings! 

some more applications

I have been thinking that two applications I would like to build are a TableTop IDE for paired development (I'm told this is a bad idea so now I want to do it even more). 

The other one was a video observation table used by a group to label the observed actions. 

iphone sdk available

I've been working on the UIST paper and getting side tracked looking at new iPhone developer stuff. All objective C and very swish too, I could get something working quick but I think lots of other developers would have a steeper learning curve. 

Makes me wonder what I might write if I had the inclination to make an application for cash. Something weby mashupy comes to mind but does this use the multi touchness? Some ideas are leaking into my mind but nothing definite. 

In recovery

I have been down with Flu for last 4 days totally unable to move. Now feeling raw but in recovery. UIST is getting too close.

I was wondering about spam. Why hasn't anyone just invented a more secure email protocol one that checks that sender is the sender when sending mail and delivers it by a separate mechanism?

OK you need a new email browser for a while but I guess most people would be happy to do this if it got rid of needless junk email. I'm not asking much, we already need a password to check email why no to send it as well? 

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.