In Traction

A preliminary program for EIS 2007 is online. I will be presenting in the session on Models for Reasoning from 09:00 to 13:00 on Saturday, March 24.

We sent in the camera-ready version of our paper yesterday, after an unpleasant experience with trying to convert our original LaTeX version to a Word document. Fortunately, it took us less time than expected thanks to Yves who wrote a few Word macros to help with the conversion.

I’m looking forward to the conference. The list of accepted papers seems interesting.

I had some fun writing a Python wrapper around libphidgets for an RFID reader we had lying around here. To do so, I used ctypes (”apparantly”::http://ailab.ch/pipermail/libphidgets-discuss/2006-February/000442.html the Python bindings for libphidgets were broken). To check for a connected RFID reader, I interfaced with hal through dbus. Afterwards I created a simple GUI for the device with PyGTK.

Here is the result:

I experienced some weird permissions problems though. The device could only be opened with root privileges. Takis helped me step through libphidgets to see if there was a bug in it. In the end, we solved it by changing the /etc/udev/rules.d/permissions.rules file (in my case it was called 40-permissions.rules). I’m not sure if there are any security problems with this though.

I changed these lines:

# USB devices (usbfs replacement)
SUBSYSTEM=="usb_device", MODE="0664"

to:

# USB devices (usbfs replacement)
SUBSYSTEM=="usb_device", GROUP="plugdev", MODE="0664"

I will probably put the code online when I have some spare time (and after I cleaned it up a bit).