Working at DFKI is awesome, and now there is a video showing the work done by Marcus Liwicki to bring touch-tables and collaborative work to the next level. This is a peak outcome by the people from our km group, led by Professor Andreas Dengel. Saher El-Neklawy did part of the programming, many people contributed here.



Others say:
if you’ve ever had to sit down with people at the collaboration table, I think you’ll recognize how well this system matches that experience. I really appreciate the approach they’ve taken, and I look forward to seeing where else it will go.

Our website says:
The touch&write pen-abled interactive touchtable combines infrared technology for the normal touching and moving with the digital pen technology for high resolution handwriting. This allows an intuitive switch between the modes object manipulation, and content editing.

Touch & Write is an innovative new platform for creating applications, that users find natural to use. It seamlessly integrates the paper world into the digital world. Editing, arranging and writing tasks can be easily performed in an intuitive way.

The construction of Touch & Write as a table top environment encourages collaborative settings. Users surround the table, discuss their ideas and work together. Since intuitive handwriting is allowed as an input metaphor, the creativity is furthermore supported.

Some of the shown parts in the demo are based on technology connected to things we do in the semantic part of DFKI, our department is a really nice environment to work in ;-)

The co-located Akademy/KDE and GUADEC/GNOME "desktop summit" is over, and various bloggers report about the outcome. pro-linux news. Sebastian Trüg witnesses joint conference.

A summary statement on the KDE blogs by Richard Moore reports that NEPOMUK and the Semantic Desktop are key elements to build upon (also mentioning it before the new GUI) and distinguish the KDE desktop from others. During his keynote, Sebastian Kügler, board member of KDE Ev, announced that more funding will go into the Semantic Desktop area:
KDE e.V. will sponsor a series of developer meetings that focus on integrating these features into the desktop. We invite teams inside KDE to think about how their software can benefit from the semantic framework introduced in KDE 4. The semantic desktop has the potential of being a game-changer for the Free Desktop, as it provides a way to model the user's data closer to how the human brain does it. It will move the computer's user interface one step closer to the user. (copied from Richard Moore's post, I cannot cross-check if Sebastian really said that)

Most apparent and important for me: gnome and KDE people work in parallel, but with closer and closer cooperation. An interesting aspect on this merge and cooperation is our contribution from the Semantic Desktop side:
KDE's strigi library is getting closer to gnome's tracker. As Sebastian Trüg writes, tracker is now using RDF and sparql.

As a common ground, developers from both projects agreed in April on using the NEPOMUK ontologies, and this will for cooperation grew and grew since then. I am helping a bit from the side of www.oscaf.org, an organization that was founded as a place for standardization work by DERI, DFKI, and KDE. There I represent DFKI, and we had to rethink our process a lot to cater for the needs of open-source projects.

So, I am watching open-mouthed at how ontologies really help building a common model between domain experts (horrayy, they work) and cannot imagine what will happen soon in the KDE/Gnome community around NEPOMUK. I really can't, because with these many brains who now cooperate, innovation is speeding up by the minute, and its not predictable anymore what semantic desktop applications will be there in a year. Looking forward to it, though :-)

Giving praise to the Nokia E70 must never stop. Since it appeared on this planet in May 2006, it is the killer of all. As thebestpageintheuniverse says: "Your iPhone is a piece of shit and so is your face" compared to my E70, which could probably even revive Michael Jackson.

Here the grafik stolen from bestpage:


What I achieved today reaches a solid 1000 on my personal geekness scale. I bought joikuspot which is a - legen-waitforit-dary WIFI HOTSPOT for symbian os. Yes, it uses the builtin Wifi functionality of the E70 (rocking, eh? wifi in your phone 2006!) as a hotspot instead of a client. To be precise, as a wifi p2p connection.

Alas, I am now sitting with my Apple laptop here, my phone next to me and enjoying a zeroconf-like connection to the internet. No bloody bluetooth, no labyrinthesk setup of modem over bluetooth over serial over your grandmas bra. Just plain old "wifi network name, WEP key, GO". That includes you, my friend. next time you drop by and need web with your laptop but don't have one ready, I am there for you.

OMG OMG. I mean, the last years, all these days when we did street art and mobile clubbings, permanent breakfasts, etc - now with that access point - multiple people can upload shit to the web in parallel. everywhere. This was what I always wanted: a small battery powered device you put into a room, press a button, say "this room now got internet, welcome to the future". With no bloody WIFI UMTS usb dongle. Next thing, they will implement beaming for the E70.

Ok, but the reason for my enthousiasm is, that next, I am going to buy the amnazing http://www.eye.fi/. That is, a whopping SD card with Wifi client - get the picture? Take a picture, press "protect" on the cam, the SD card uses TCP/IP to connect to a service at eye.fi, which then uploads the pic directly from the fat32 filesystem of your camera to flickr. awesomeness, here I come...

Die Clubveranstalter meines Vertrauens, frohlocker.de, haben einen neuen mix gekocht. Frisch am start auf der Frohlocker homepage "Floorrocker"

http://frohlocker.de/Floorrocker.htm



Schon runtergezogen, versüßt mir das Arbeitsklima hier.

Ich bin auch tiefst berührt über meinen verfrühten Tod in Kaiserslautern, der von den Frohlockoren beklagt wurde:
Btw. ein leidiges Ding wäre da noch. Unser hochgeschätzter Discotiger und FrohlockerSuperfotograf, Freund und Ehemann, also nicht unserer aber einer der reizenden Ingrid, aslo nicht einer sondern der, einzige, versteht sich, ist verschieden. Aus Lautern verschieden. Lebendig begraben in der Tristess, Melancholie und bisweilen der Inzest verschrieenen Stadt Wien. Aber wir werden sein Andenken in Ehren halten und Ihn sooft es geht dort besuchen, um ordenlich clubben zu gehen!
danke leo für die lustige Zeit mit Dir, auf Wiedersehen, küss die Hoand!
Oh mei, oh mei, ihr habt ja leider mit allem Recht. Wäre ich doch nie weggegangen :-(. Die Party ist vorerst aus, die Sperrstunde hat angefangen. Jetzt wird geschafft und dick das Business gemacht, "go to work" ist das Motto des Tages und "we make money, not art". Aber holt mich mal raus, kommt vorbei und zeigt mir wieder das Clubben!
Wünsche euch Gottes fetten Segen und die frohlockersten Parties der Welt, euer, euch liebender, Partytiger.

We are now settled in vienna. Here are more pictures: http://www.flickr.com/photos/leobard/sets/72157620712684742/



Had my first day at my new job: being founder of www.gnowsis.com. went good.

still unsure about my identity, I really like being European, having stayed in Germany for five years and travelling to ~50 places opened my mind. So I pick: Auslandsösterreicher auf längerem Heimaturlaub. I will also keep blogging under the category "neue Heimat", which I started five years ago for germany.