bouvin's

I was lucky enough to have the opportunity of getting access (through Rasmus Vinge) to one of the cranes involved with the on-going construction work here at IT-Byen. Though the climb is a bit of a bother with a bunch of unwieldy photobags, the view more than makes up for it.

Mads defended successfully his PhD thesis (entitled “Empowering Mobile Devices through Cyber Foraging”) yesterday. Thus ends the Locusts project, and I have lost a PhD student (my first!) but gained a colleague. We will continue to work on the Locusts technologies and frameworks, all open source and available.

I am happy to announce that I have accepted an offer of the position as associate professor in mobile software architectures here at the Department of Computer Science. My area of research is vibrant and active, and I’m excited to be part of it, especially considering how much work is being done locally on this and related topics. Thus, I’m here to stay and might even get around to doing more with these pages.

The P2P Networking course site is found at AULA. If you have not used AULA before, you’ll have to register before you can join the course.

I am absolutely delighted to present to you: The very first demonstrator of the Locusts framework (the research project, I’m pursuing together with Mads D. Kristensen and Morten H. Møller). This short video shows the demonstrator AugIM in action:

A big congratulation to my good friend, Anders Brodersen, for successfully defending his PhD-thesis titled “Flexible Methods for Geometric Texturing—From Terrain Visualization to Geometric Texture Mapping”.

Now this is more like it – super vision glasses able to accommodate the eye to a much higher degree that ordinary optics. I can probably never attain 20/20 vision (unless I can get me one of those neat Terminator-styled eyes, research is being done there, but not quite able on high street yet), but this certainly seems nice. First spotted on BoingBoing.

If you came to my Website, because you’ve got a new (if used) iPod mini, and you were wondering about the former owner (what, with the engraving and all), then wonder no more: You have bought a stolen iPod, and I would like it back, please.

The hypermedia exams are over for this year. My students generally did well as can be seen above.. I have been running the hypermedia course for quite a few years, and always seem to end with this shape and approximately the same average.

I’m at the Fourth International Conference for Interaction Design and Children in my favourite Colorado town Boulder (where I lived as a PhD student for five months in 2000 visiting these fine folks). My presentation on the paper “Tools of Contextualization – Extending the Classroom to the Field” (co-authored together with Christina Brodersen, Allan Hansen, Ole Iversen & Peter Nørregaard) is available online. The HyConExplorer systems described in the paper is available for download.

I suffered a catastrophic harddisk failure yesterday. My workstation has three disks, and the involved one contained all my personal files and all my development work, source code etc. Upon inspection the offending disk turned out to be a 40 GB IBM Deskstar, leaving me to wonder why it had not failed before. Our highly skilled technical staff quickly replaced the dead disk, returned the machine to me, and this is where we get to the morale of this story: I have over the years developed a healthy paranoia with regards to data loss, so I keep all my data synced across as many machines as I work with (currently 5), so I was back in business 10 minutes later when I had finished restoring everything from my portable PC over Firewire.

So, by virtue of a strict backup policy (and given a few scripts, it is trivial to do), this potentially devastating blow to my productivity was but a minor annoyance. So do your backups – your crash is coming too..

You just gotta love a title like that. Besides, it is an interesting experiment demonstrating an innovative use of wetware. Spotted at Defense Tech.

The Web site for the Peer-to-Peer Networking course, I’m doing this quarter, is available through KursusWeb. Lectures start next week.

Yay, they did it! The X-Prize should be secured. Apparently a smooth ride, this time.

Now this is a project with long term perspective – the Rosetta Project aims to permanently document 1000 languages for the future in a form able to withstand millennia. Considering how useful the original Rosetta Stone was, this could become real handy at some future point. Nice to see people focused on more than the next quarter.

I’ve got GMail. Thank you, Polle!
Obligatory UserFriendly link.

Now this is huge: SpaceShipOne has completed its first 100 KM test. This marks the beginning of private manned space flight, and I certainly hope (and believe) that this is merely the beginning of something much bigger. Space tourism is very well, but we need to get out of NEO, well out of the gravity well, and into space proper. Yes, Virginia, there really are no bounds to growth, but we have to leave the planet to attain it.

This delightful development has been spurred on by the Ansari X-Prize foundation, and the winner (the first to take three people 100 km up twice within 14 days) will get $10 mill. This will of course not cover development costs, but getting first to the market of space tourism will be much, much bigger.

Links galore: Pretty pictures, CNN, SpaceFlightNow, SpaceDaily, BBC News.

Yay, the hypermedia exams are over for this year. My students generally did well. and as can be seen above, they don’t talk about a bell-shaped curve for nothing. I have been running the hypermedia course for quite a few years, and always seem to end with this shape and approximately the same average.

Despite having done this course before, I still find it an interesting course to teach (it is after all within my primary field of research). One innovation I added this year was recording all my lectures (using my Palm Tungsten|T) and publishing them as MP3 files (for high compression (24 Kb/s), I have found the Fraunhofer codecs to be the best, though I probably should investigate Speex, but I’m being held back by the nigh-universal support for MP3). This was very popular with the students, and is sure to be repeated.

(A note for non-Danish readers: Grades in Denmark are (still) divided into 00, 03, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, and 13, where 13 is best (and rarely used), 6 is a passing grade (yes, we have 3 different failing grades), and 8 is the average grade. Strange, I know, but it works surprisingly well).

A big congratulation to René Dalsgaard Larsen for his fine work on a P2P hypermedia system and his successful defense of his master’s thesis – see HyperPeer Central for more details. I had the pleasure of being René’s advisor, and we have written a (short) paper about his system to be presented at the Hypertext 2004 conference. (I should note that the odd hat is by no means part of any Danish graduation ceremony).

Now this is almost amusing – I frequent the excellent www.spacedaily.com for my regular dose of space and avionics related news. However, today I by mistake went to http://www.dailyspace.com/ (quite safe for work) and found not quite what I expected. Note, how these enlightened folks have even imitated the logo of the original site. But I guess if the message is not compelling enough in itself, you gotta trick people to come on in…