Mensch und Computer 2006 – Tuesday after lunch

Posted on 5. September 2006 by kenn-blog

Todays invited talk was by Matthias Rauterberg from University of Eindhoven , he reported on a new project in which he tries to create the western equivalent on the ZENetic computer which is called ALICE. As ZENetic tries to demonstrate the essences of the “eastern”, i.e., buddhist culture, ALICE uses “Alice in Wonderland” to illustrate the “western” ideas of time (the rabbit), space (the rabbit hole), logic reasoning on space and time (the Cheshire Cat dialogue) and so on…
A member of the Group of Peter Forbig from Universität Rostock reported on a model-driven development system for PDA applications. They have modified eclipse to contain a CTT-like editor to generate an xml task description.

Christian Ressel from Fraunhofer IMS was presenting an adaptive user interface for home automation. It creates UIs based on the user and the environment.

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Mensch und Computer 2006, Tuesday Sessions

Posted on 5. September 2006 by kenn-blog

Today, I will be presenting our WInspect Glove in the poster session.

Irma Lindt from the Fraunhofer FIT is presenting a pervasive game called “epidemic menace“. This is part of an EU integrated project called Iperg

The game has stationary and mobile players equiped with different game devices, cell phones, PDAs and an AR System. Localization is based on GPS, communication based on WLAN. Game Balancing is changed by an interactive operator interface during play in order to keep the game going.

Some results on Hand-Eye Coordination in an industrial application of AR were presented by Milda Park from RWTH Aachen. The system has been developed by the BMBF TEREBES project on AR-assisted welding. The device looks very much like the one designed by iid in Bremen, as also mentioned by Prof. Rahe in his IFAWC talk. The AR system seems to be based on the ARToolkit, the markers used in the examples look very familiar. The results were that hand-eye-coordination is affected by using the AR system and that a higher framerate improves hand-eye-coordination. Due to technical limitations, only 16fps and 20fps have been used for the experiments. Significant influences were welders vs. non-welders and AR vs. non-AR. For welders, non-AR task performance were 51% more accurate than AR task performance. For non-welders it was 56%. Framerate difference was not significant. Signal delay was not measured and thus not analyzed.

André Melzer from IMIS at Uni Lübeck is presenting TAPE-Player, an interactive radio drama environment. It allows to play, i.e., speak a role in a radio drama and influence the play.

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Mensch und Computer 2006, Monday

Posted on 5. September 2006 by kenn-blog

This week, I’m at the Mensch und Computer Conference. It’s taking place at the Fachhochschule Gelsenkirchen.

An interesting presentation yesterday came from Daniel Michelis who presented the urban installation magical mirrors in Berlin.

Posted in Art Music Culture, Computer Science, Conferences, Fun, Pervasive & Ubiquitous, Research, Wearable Computing | Leave a comment

Terror : Angst essen Denken auf

Posted on 22. August 2006 by kenn-blog

ZEIT online – Deutschland – – – Terror : Angst essen Denken auf

An overview of the german press on Anti-Terrorism-Measures. Most newspapers are calling for more surveillance and security measures and only few are thinking about the effectiveness of such measures and are worried about the loss of freedom which, coincidently, is the ultimate goal of the terrorists.

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Uni Freiburg Rescue Robots: autonomous climbing and visual odometry

Posted on 18. August 2006 by kenn-blog

Alexander Kleiner from the AI working group at Uni Freiburg has posted some cool videos of their robots on their website. You can see them here. It shows a tarantula robot climbing over various obstacles and using visual odometry to keep track of its position in space. As you cannot use wheel-based odometry on the tarantulas, this is a major step towards self-localization of complex track-based robot in unknown environments.

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Updating my thinkpad…

Posted on 18. August 2006 by kenn-blog

I tried to update my thinkpad because of this bug. And while doing so, I wondered if the .cab I downloaded actually installed properly. So I chose to updat the AccessIBM software to the newest version to automatically upgrade all drivers. Which told me that the recovery partition on my thinkpad is very outdated. So i downloaded 216 Megs, cleaned up my harddrive to install the installer. Cleaned up my harddrive again to run the second installer that the first installer installed in c:\ibmtools. Defragmented my harddrive to run that installer. Completed the installer. Rebooted as the installer wanted me to do. Ended up with a dead ThinkPad. 🙁

Well, IBM/Lenovo does not really care for a grub installation that you may have on the harddisk. And it also updates the bios on the machine. I don’t really know what side effect this was, but grub only said “GRUB” on boot and nothing more. So I dug out an old Knoppix CD and tried for a couple of hours with grub-install. Didn’t work, no matter what options i gave (–root-directory=/mnt/hda2 –force-lba and whatever) I got “The file stage1 not read correctly.”
This morning, I figured out that grub-install is a shellscript and that this shellscript has some clever safety checks that are sometimes not so clever.

It tries to figure out if the files read by grub are the same as the files read by the OS. If it thinks the files differ, it refuses to install. As I booted from knoppix, it could not figure out the proper mountpoint of /mnt/hda3 (which is my disk root partition) so it thought that the boot/grub/stage1 file on hda3 has somehow not been properly copied. But that file was already there, I just wanted a proper boot sector that the IBM rescue installation wrecked.

So I figured out all I had to do is to start grub manually (as the grub-install does too) to bypass all clever checks and just specify

root (hd0,2)

setup (hd0)

And as grub is smart, it figured out that the files were already present on hd0,2 and installed and configured the boot sector properly. And I rebooted and everything went well since.

Thank you IBM/Lenovo for letting me find out again what I never wanted to know in the first place.

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