In Traction

Neil Wilson contacted me about the Vibrantink colorscheme for Vim I created a while ago based on John Lam’s settings. He wanted to include it in the vim-rails package, which might be distributed with Ubuntu Gutsy, the next release of the Ubuntu Linux distro.

The vim-rails package is a collection of vim scripts that make editing Rails applications much easier. Neil also included another Vibrantink clone for Vim: vividchalk by Tim Pope, the author of rails.vim.

Here is a comparison between the original TextMate color scheme, vibrantink.vim and vividchalk.vim. Vibrantink.vim is less colorful than vividchalk but it resembles the original TextMate theme the most, although it applies the wrong color to the class method attr_reader.

I would like to have good syntax highlighting for other languages besides Ruby (e.g. C# and LaTeX) in the future. Who knows, when I find some spare time …

The paper we submitted to DIPSO 2007 (a workshop at this year’s Ubicomp conference) has been accepted.

Title: Making Bits and Atoms Talk Today - A Practical Architecture for Smart Object Interaction

Authors: Jo Vermeulen, Ruben Thys, Kris Luyten and Karin Coninx

Abstract:
Bringing together the physical and digital worlds has been the subject of research for some time now. In particular, a number of successful prototypes that link physical objects with digital information (often called smart object systems) have already been presented. However, a generally accepted architecture to design such systems has not yet emerged. This paper presents a reusable and practical framework for developing smart object applications today. At the basis of our approach lies the use of Semantic Web technology to drive interaction between the physical and digital worlds. We used this framework
to develop SemaNews, a novel application that combines the advantages of digital news feeds with those of physical newspapers. We prove that our architecture is reusable by building a second prototype in a different application domain: STalkingObjects implements the basic components of a store of the future.

Venue and date: Innsbruck, Austria, September 16, 2007