08.21.08
P2P Networking course site
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.
04.19.08
First Locusts Demonstrator
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:
06.27.07
Anders Brodersen PhD
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”.
02.12.06
Adaptive optics for glasses
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.
11.22.05
New iPod?
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.
06.23.05
Hypermedia exams over
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.
06.09.05
IDC 2005 Talk
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.
03.08.05
Paranoid Policies Vindicated
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..
12.09.04
Brain grown from rat cells learns to fly jet
You just gotta love a title like that. Besides, it is an interesting experiment demonstrating an innovative use of wetware. Spotted at Defense Tech.
10.22.04
dP2P Web site up
The Web site for the Peer-to-Peer Networking course, I’m doing this quarter, is available through KursusWeb. Lectures start next week.
10.04.04
SpaceShipOne redux
Yay, they did it! The X-Prize should be secured. Apparently a smooth ride, this time.
08.23.04
The Rosetta Project
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.
06.21.04
Go SpaceShipOne!
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.
06.16.04
Hypermedia exams over
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).
06.14.04
Congratulations
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).
06.10.04
Dangerous fanatics at it again
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…
06.07.04
European Laurie Anderson site
Lo and behold, a European Laurie Anderson site. I have had the pleasure of seeing Laurie twice (and have met the lady once), and she is always delightfully good, whether live or recorded. If she has one fault, it is that she does not tour Europe near often enough, so having a site following her activities in Europe is a good move.
05.31.04
Ah, weekend
I went and visited my folks this weekend (there were a couple of public holidays this weekend + Monday, and luckily these are also for atheists). Below are a few pictures I took while lounging around the house. This is quintessential Denmark to me - green pastures with the occasional cow - green & pleasant land indeed.
We went to the Hjemsted Oldtidspark, which has a pretty decent exhibition, but excels in its many craft booths, manned by volunteers interested in most things between bronze age and medieval (I did not see any Vikings, but you can find plenty of those at other fairs). If the weather had not been as good as it was (and the booths as plenty), the place would have been overpriced - I fear Denmark does not lack in overpriced tourist attractions. In the picture below, you can see a badger being skinned (badgers are a protected species in Denmark, but you are allowed to skin roadkill)
05.27.04
J2ME Fragmentation
We are getting into some serious development with J2ME, and this article highlights the greatest problem with developing for mobile phones, namely that of fragmentation. I’ve tried writing Symbian programs in C++ and didn’t like it one bit (I find C++ nasty as it is, but the Symbian variant is especially horrid), but it would seem that even ‘Write Once Run Anywhere’ Java won’t save us this time. To wit:
Whether you consider physical device elements such as processing speed, memory or screen size, or variations in the implementation of the JVM or custom APIs—customizing Java applications for the more than 200 (and growing) different Java enabled-devices in the market is a major concern for J2ME developers.
At least I have the consolation, that our focus is strictly (at this time) Series 60 Symbian phones…
Go to JavaWorld for the rest of the article.
