Another fascinating day at DIMEA 2008. One of the keynotes, by the Greek artist Michalou(di)s, described sculpting using silica aerogel. It's an incredibly light insulator, but it also has a strange "immaterial" beauty to it, like looking into a cloud. Very cool. I also saw presentations on AI painting, biometric sensing art (right up my alley), and a very cool haptic device that rests on the nail of the finger, but makes the user feel like their touching something in the front.

It's about 4:30 local time--I swear I was tired when I got back here. Oh, well.

The conference is going really well. The presentations so far have been just fantastic--I've seen some great stuff for big games, locative media and pervasive computing. I was especially pleased to see Annika Waern and Josephine Reid present their respective papers--I've read about their other projects, so it's great to see the latest work.

I've made it to the conference in one piece--fortunately I was waiting for the bus early. I don't present until Friday, so I have the next few days to soak it all in. The list of presenters and demos looks pretty good, too, so I think I'll come out of this with some interesting new precedents to think about. Keynote's in ten minutes, so I'm off.

So I finally arrived in Athens. The Galini Hotel, while not exactly a "palace", is nice with a great view of the sea and a mini bar stocked with reasonably priced mineral water. That was especially key when I first got here. I missed my stop by a good margin and had to trudge back here in the heat of the in my suit jacket, wheelie bag in tow. Feh--I need to improve my ability to transliterate Greek. At any rate, I'm settled and rehydrated and due for a nap. More later.

I presented an overview of the Sydewynder application to Sven Travis's Creativity and Computation lecture class today. I've attached the PowerPoint and PDF below (and an OpenDocument presentation can be posted, if anybody wants that).

Also, I've released Sydewynder 0.1.1, which has the option to take screenshots of the apps as they run (useful for putting together the presentation) and a new "Round Robin" sample app that shows how to send a single SMS messages to multiple recipients and multiple messages to several recipient lists.

The latest version of Sydewynder, our mobile application server for the S60, has been released! With Sydewynder, any S60 phone, like the Nokia N80, can become an automated SMS gateway. You can grab version 0.1 off of the SourceForge site.

This new version features:

• scripts can now connect to WiFi, making Internet-enabled responses possible!
• emulator for off-phone development. Now students don't need to have a phone to develop mobile apps for it
• two tabbed pane view for logging and status indicators
• start up screen -- very pretty!
• a much better UI
• a new example application using WiFi - "We Feel Fine". It taps into the wefeelfine.org API

And these bugs were fixed:

• recipients in the address book could not receive text message responses
• unicode text problems

Much thanks for Sven, Colleen, Chuck, Eric, Albert, and Chloe for their support, ideas, and code.

I had a great time at the Mobilized conference this past weekend. I taught a brief workshop on Sydewynder to the folks there, and I got a pretty good response. Here's a Flickr photo from the event:

Thanks again to Paul Notzold for sharing his computer and running

During the winter break of 2006-2007, Chris Hennelly and I spent a bunch of free time working on the Spy in the Lab project. The Spy was supposed to go to our friends at Tsinghua University and peek in on all the stuff they were doing. It didn't quite make it for that semester, but we got it working pretty close to 100% by the time we were done with break.

It was sitting in the 10 Years Running Show at the Chelsea Art Museum.

What's in the box?!: Inside this unassuming cardboard box sits an Internet-controlled robot with a camera and a range of sensors that keep it from destroying itself and those around it.

The Command Center