Shelves Fixing

2 heating engineers from Central Services came this morning to fix some shelves.

See also the previous intervention.

Spam as Poetry

Spam poetry has be slashdotted by michael in his post Spam as Poetry.

My spam filter receives about 500/wk, and within those frisky messages, among the pulp and porn, comes some pretty daring poetry

Very similar to my Spam Poetry idea of From Spam to Info Art.

The Sociable Media Group

The Sociable Media Group is interested in questions concerning society and identity in the networked world. Some of the group’s research questions include: How do we perceive other people on-line?, What does a virtual world look like?, and How do social conventions develop in the networked world? Visitors can learn about the most recent research projects, along with taking a look at the thought provoking blog. [Via the Internet Scout Report]

Cinco Días en Asturias, Paraiso Natural

StrategyBob2

Early version of StrategyBob2, the Java version of StrategyBob, a strategy visualizer for the BILL (Biology Instruments Learning Lab) module.

CatchBob Enhancements

The development of CatchBob is moving forward. As real-time data communication is not longer required (the players will pull the data), dealing with TCP got easier. No mneed to keep stateful connection in an uncertain network environment anymore. Basically, the iPAQ connects to the server socket every time the player wants to be located and wants to coordinate with the others and closes the connection at the end of the transaction. The server keeps a thread pool of sockets. Solution for real-time communication would have been to use UDP (which could have been a headaches to deal with on the EPFL campus).

Today’s improvements are:
- The access point sniffer object was moved from a Timer to a Thread.
- A drawable map replaces the semi-structured communication context menu.
- A sound notifies that a scan has been performed
- The best signal strength is displayed

Read the rest of this entry »

Blogs: Des Scénarios Académiques

Blogs: Des Scénarios Académiques est un article à la mode Cooltown de Nicolas, Patrick et moi décrivant des scénarios d’utilisation des blogs dans le monde académique.

Mai au Parc

Web Services between .NET and Java

Although SOAP is now a standard, different implementations of web services are using it in ways that sometime makes the interoperability with other SOAPs hard if not impossible. Web Services between .NET, Java and MS SOAP Toolkit written in 8/2001 explains that accessing Apache SOAP for Java Service via a .NET client does not work because xsi:type is required in Apache SOAP for Java.

Apperently since then some efforts has been done in the Soap Interop movement. Dev4Net :: Web Service Interoperability summaries the current situation between the Microsoft Soap Toolkit 2.0 sp2, Apache for the Apache Axis (Alpha 2) implementation, and .NET for the Microsoft ASP.NET. Apparently interoperability between .NET Client -> Apache Service seems to work. Interoperability with Other SOAP Implementations give more in depth information on the interop problems with the Apache Soap implementation.

Developing WiFi Applications with the .NET Compact Framework

Developing smart device applications sharing real-time information with peer devices and desktops over WiFi has its challenges. The biggest problem I had so for was to deal the uncertain network connectivity of a wireless network. In other words, the connection must be tolerant to its sometimes-connected-sometimes-not nature. Something that I found hard to solve using a connection oriented protocol like TCP. In Developing Smart Device WiFi Applications with the .NET Compact Framework, Jim Wilson introduces his own MultiCommFramework, which allows .NET Compact Framework and Full .NET Framework applications to share information in a WiFi friendly way. MultiCommFramework is modeled after the concept of multicasting and utilizes connectionless UDP datagrams.