Jesper Jarlskov's development blog

Open Source Days 2010 – Call for Speakers

Jesper Jarlskov — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 23:28:10 +0000

The 5th and 6th of march, 2010, it’s time for the 11th reincarnation of the Open Source Days conference in Copenhagen. This time it will go down at the IT-University.
Since the time for the event is closing in, work is being done to close deals with all the speakers, but there is still room in the schedule for more people interested in speaking.
Therefore the people behind the event has sent out a Call for Speakers, and they’re still interested in:

Lightning talks
Keynotes
Birds of a Feather (BoF) – Discussion
Community booths

If your interested in speaking, you shouldn’t hesitate to get in touch with the event organizers, and tell them about your subject, and what makes it so interesting.
Like last year, we’re hoping to be allowed to represent Ubuntu Denmark with a community booth, are you gonna come talk, discus, or just attend the event?

Open Source Days 2010 – Call for Speakers is a post from: Jesper Jarlskov's development blog

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A context-aware mobile application (introducing bachelor’s thesis)

Jesper Jarlskov — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 12:39:52 +0000

In my last blog post I wrote a fundamental introduction to context-awareness, and mentioned briefly how it fitted into my daily life, and my bachelor’s thesis.
This time I will explain a bit more what the thesis will be about.

For my bachelor’s thesis I will try and combine information gathered from a person’s social media accounts, with their context at any given time. Parts of this has been realized earlier, for instance in the project Dodgeball, recently closed by Google, or the similar Foursquare project. These services works (/worked) by having the user send in a text message from their cell phone, and “check-in” at specified venues, their friends in the vicinity will then be notified allowing people to hook up without ad hoc.
The vision of the bachelor’s thesis is to let people find each other in a similar way, but without the actual user interaction (of course you would still have to do the actual moving), by having your cell phone share your location with your friends through social media sites like facebook. This could make it easier to meet up with people you know when your going out, for example by checking if you actually show up at the events you RSVP’ed on facebook, and check if any of your friends are there.

Context-based event suggestions

Combining the enormous amounts of data provided by all of the social media sites wouldn’t be feasible, one reason is that the amounts of data would become to much for anyone, without proper filtering, another reason is that the size of a project like that, would be a lot larger than what’s available for a bachelor’s thesis.
To put up relevant boundaries for the project I will concentrate on suggesting music events based on the kind of music the user prefers, and the location of the user.
The project should end out with an application for a cell phone (probably for Android) that would, when activated, will inform the user of music events starting in his vicinity, based on his musical preferences.

The details

The project is still in a pretty early stage so a most details still need a lot of work. I will most likely end up with 2 programming tasks, the mobile application as described above, and a server application. This is done to keep the mobile application as simple (small) as possible, to let the server take care of most API work and filtering (to save power) and to try and separate different layers of the application, keeping a loose coupling.
Another aspect that has to be considered further is the security aspect. Where should login details and passwords for the different social media sites be stored and stuff. The information has to be at-hand for the server application to fetch the user’s data from the sites, but the info itself should only be available to the owner.

A context-aware mobile application (introducing bachelor’s thesis) is a post from: Jesper Jarlskov's development blog

Context-awareness

Context-awareness

Jesper Jarlskov — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 16:56:40 +0000

As the name implies, context-awareness is about being aware of the context you are in. For most people being context-aware means knowing things like where they are, and which people are around them. But it can be a lot more than that, and it can be used in a lot of different situations.
For an engineer building houses being context-aware could mean not building a 12-story apartment building in the countryside, where people would prefer to live in 1 or 2-story houses. It’s also about adapting to the surrounding environment, like making buildings in Japan resistant to earthquakes, since they occur quite often.
So all in all context-awareness is a lot about where you are located, and what is going on all around you. But it can be a lot more than that. Being context-aware can also mean being aware of what you are doing right now. If you got both your arms full going to the counter in the supermarket and your cell phones starts ringing, being context-aware keeps you from answering your cell phone, thus keeping you from dropping all your goods to smash on the floor (though surprisingly few people actually acts this way).

Most people are context-aware most of the time, which helps them handle everyday life, and all of this is pretty self-explanatory in most situations, now I’ve just put a name on it. So what is a talk about context-awareness doing on a blog about software and software development?
Consider what it would mean if software was context-aware. Most people today own a cell phone, and carries it everywhere, all the time, but it mostly just sits in a pocket or similar and just does it’s job. When somebody calls you up on your cell phone or send a text message, the cell phone vibrates or make a noise, nice and easy, the user makes an interaction with the cell phone, and the cell phone responds. But interesting things could happen, if the phone was made aware of the context it’s operating in.

What is context-aware software

Making a software context-aware could make way for several enhancements, by for example making cell phones react differently under different circumstances. One example of context-aware cell phones is the cell phones which has a built-in light sensor, and adjusts the brightness of the display based on the amount of light in the room, thus preventing the user from being blinded by an extremely bright display while standing in a dark room. That’s being aware of your physical context.
Another kind of context-aware software could be facebook which suggest friends and activities to each user based on what their friends “like”. That’s being aware of your social context.
What is becoming obvious here is that there are several kinds of context, each providing it’s own information. For each additional “level” of context you can add to your application it will apparently be possible for the application to provide more focused information to the user. For a salesman who normally spends most of his working hours, Monday through Friday from 8-16 in his office, the cell phone following him around, in his pocket, could have a pretty good idea of the context he is normally in. If then, one Wednesday at 13, his cell phone’s status is still set to work, but the cell phone knows from it’s GPS-coordinates that he is not in his office. That would tell the cell phone that the user (the salesman) is not in his office, but is most likely out to attend a meeting, so if someone calls it probably wouldn’t be appreciated if the cell phone just started playing music at the maximum volume available, thus the cell phone would turn down it’s volume, and only use the vibrator functionality to alert the user of an incoming call. This functionality could possibly be achieved using the context of the person’s work, by keeping a log of his daily routines, and comparing it with the phone’s location, using the GPS-sensor and the phone’s status, which is set by the user.

Context-aware mobile applications

So, why is all this interesting? I believe that making software more context-aware can help greatly increase the usability of the software. Even small things like making often-used functionality easier to reach, and hiding functions that the user never uses, can make for a slicker more user-friendly interface.
My own main interest in this subject right now, is that I’ve just started working on my bachelor thesis. The main part of this project will be focused on a context-aware application for cell phones. If this subject has your interest you should check back here once in a while, or follow my rss-feed, since I will write a lot more posts on the subject as my project develops.

Pitfalls

Of course context-awareness isn’t all good. To be context-aware, the software has to keep track of the user, this will usually include some means that some people will consider surveillance, and get the usual “big brother shivers”. This is very valid concerns. For several years we have seen online advertisers using tracking cookies to follow people around, as they surf the internet. This information would then be used to provide each surfer with personalized advertising, thus raising the click-through-rate for the advertisements.
I’m personally very much against surveillance. This can to some extend collide with my interest in serving personalized information based on user preferences. That’s why anonymity is a big concern in my own project. Since the project is still in it’s early stages I’m still not quite sure how to handle the issue, but right now I’m thinking something like only accessing information in a need-to-know basis, as in, only letting the application fetch the information it actually needs, and besides that, only storing the information that’s absolutely crucial to store. In that regard I’m also considering placing as much as possible of the available information on the cell phone, and not on the central server, thus keeping the user’s personal information on the user’s device with the user where it belongs.

I hope that this introduction to context-awareness has caught your interest, and that you will check back later to follow my posts as the projects develops and more posts will be published to the blog. If you have any feedback, questions or comments, please leave a comment, and I will take a look at it. Inspiration and suggestions for other subjects or further study in this one, will be greatly appreciated as well.

Context-awareness is a post from: Jesper Jarlskov's development blog

Ubuntu Local Jam & Podcast

Jesper Jarlskov — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 08:07:53 +0000

Since the dates of the 2nd – 4th of October, where the Ubuntu Global Jam was set, didn’t fit properly into the time schedule of most Danish LoCo members, we decided to have our jam one week later. So this weekend, on Saturday the 10th of October it went down.
This was our first ever Global Jam in Copenhagen, so it wasn’t the biggest or most organized, but we had a real nice time, and I think most of the attendants would be interested in doing a similar event next time.

The Jam

5 people showed up to work on various aspects of Ubuntu. It started out with sbc giving a small introduction to bug triaging, and everyone got to work. It was interesting to try, and I think most of us discovered that it wasn’t as hard as it might seems, it’s just about getting started.
Besides hunting bugs and eating pizza, we also started a bit of work on an informational flyer to be handed out during our Karmic Koala release party (link in Danish).
All 3 hosts of the Ubuntu-dk podcast were present, and we had the time to record a few minutes of summary from the jam, to be presented in the next episode of the podcast. We also agreed to meet up tonight (Tuesday), and hopefully we’ll be able to record the last of the episode, and have it released by the end of the week, or early next week.
When the day had past and people we’re starting to move on to what they had scheduled for the night, we decided to end it all with a beer.
I think we had a real nice day, and I’m hoping that we can do it again next time.

Ubuntu Local Jam & Podcast is a post from: Jesper Jarlskov's development blog

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New Ubuntu member

Jesper Jarlskov — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 21:24:17 +0000

Hello interwebs!

Yesterday the EMEA Regional Membership Board of Ubuntu (EMEARMBoU? catchy) had their monthly meeting, with a long list of hopeful Ubuntu member prospects, as the focus point. My interview went well, my cheerers did a cheerful job, and all in all it all went pretty much as I had hoped for, that means I’m now an official Ubuntu member.
I’ve been using Ubuntu for a couple of years now, and have been an active participant of the Danish Ubuntu community for almost that long as well. My main contributions has been in the Danish LoCo, where I’ve been a mod on our forum, helped answer questions on forum and IRC and helped the new people. I’ve also written a couple of guides in Danish on my Jesper Jarlskov blog. Furthermore I’ve spent a lot of time working on moving the Danish LoCo’s website to a Drupal platform, but this is still a work in progress, especially getting a proper theme is proving a problem, but we’re working on it.
I’m also the official LoCo contact, and I’m hoping to help different LoCo’s work closer together.
Besides that, I’m studying engineering at the Technical University of Denmark with a major in IT & Telecommunication, mainly focusing on software engineering and development.

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Welcome!

Jesper Jarlskov — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 12:37:42 +0000

Hello, and welcome to my newly introduced blog. My name is Jesper Jarlskov and I’m currently studying engineering. I’ve been blogging for a while on my Jesper Jarlskov blog, but I’ve recently decided to start up a new blog, this time in English. This doesn’t mean I’ll stop blogging in danish, so if you like my other blog, don’t worry about that.

It would, of course, be pretty a waste of time if I just started this blog in English with the intention of translating my danish blog posts, so that’s not what it’ll be about. This blog will most likely function as my connection to the international Ubuntu community. Besides that I expect this blog to have more of a development focus than my danish blog.

I’ve recently had the problem statement for my bachelor’s thesis accepted, and I will start working on it ASAP. The main area of work for the thesis will be context-awareness in mobile applications, and I will be building a content-aware mobile app during the project. My plan is to have a serie of posts on this blog where I will talk about context-awareness, and how it can be used for mobile apps. I hope you will enjoy my new blog, and the focus of it, and I hope to get a lot of feedback to my posts.

Welcome! is a post from: Jesper Jarlskov's development blog