In Traction

Apparantely, there’s a Communications of the ACM group blog now, called blog@CACM. There is also a blog roll that includes the blog of Daniel Lemire, which happens to be one of my favorite research blogs. Although Daniel works in a different subdiscipline of computer science, I enjoy reading his research advice and interesting viewpoints on the process of doing research.

The group blog features an interesting post by Tessa Lau, titled Three Misconceptions About Human-Computer Interaction, which raises a few interesting points. In my opinion, HCI is much more fundamental to creating interactive systems than people usually believe. In this context, I would like to refer to an interview with Patrick Baudisch that I recently read, in which he explains how he got started in HCI:

Doantam: How did you get started working on human-computer interaction?

Patrick: Without knowing it. I was a Ph.D. student in Darmstadt, Germany and worked on user interfaces for information filtering systems. A friend of mine saw my work and said “oh, I did not know you were in HCI, too”.

That was the first time I heard of that field.

I am now using Disqus to handle the comments on my blog. Disqus is a new global blog commenting system. It has a lot of nice features, such as avatars, threaded conversations and global notifications. It allows you to track when a comment you posted got replied to and will in the future even support SMS notifications (hopefully this will work in Belgium as well). The Disqus forum page for this blog can be found at http://intraction.disqus.com/.

They have a simple Wordpress plugin that you can install. I ticked the option “Replace all entries with no comments (including future posts)” to keep my existing comments, and use Disqus for posts without comments. When they have an import system, I will probably import all existing comments into the system as well.

Robert Scoble did an interview with Daniel Ha, the CEO of Disqus.

Adam Greenfield would like to know how people respond to his talks, so hereby a call to everyone that will be attending his talk in Leuven to blog about it

I am using FeedBurner now, after reading about its powerful features.

If you are subscribed to this blog, please change the feed URL to http://feeds.feedburner.com/InTraction.

In August, they started to build another floor on top of our institute. They have progressed nicely so far:

Yesterday evening it started raining heavily (the typical Belgian weather I guess), resulting in water dripping from the wall. Fortunately, we could move back into our office this morning. There were still some stains on the wall though:

To conclude with a final picture for this blog post , I have moved into a new office since the end of August:

The room is pretty nice, there’s a lot more light than in my previous office.

In other news, Lode now finally has a homepage and even a blog. Just to let you know Lode, I don’t give up that easily

I will post a report of the other two days at Ubicomp soon (I still have to go through the notes on my laptop).