JSTUN used in Education (JSTUN)
I recently checked the webserver statistics about JSTUN and I realized that a lot of visitors came from the University of Washington. After digging a little bit deeper I found that JSTUN is used for a homework assignment for one of the their computer communication networks courses. It is nice to see that a lot of people are using JSTUN. :-)

Cheers,
Thomas
Posted by Thomas King at 22:08 2007-11-03 | Trackbacks (0) | Comments (0)

Safe 2.4.0, SafeDesktop 0.9.6, and JSTUN 0.7.0 (General)
In the last couple of days I released a lot of new versions of software I am currently maintaining. It started with updates for Safe and SafeDesktop. The most important feature here is that Safe offers now a go-to button. Let's assume you store a long list of entries in your Safe then in the past it was quite cumbersome to get to the entry that is in the middle of your list. You had to press the go-down button of your phone quite often. My Safe stores currently 123 entries and it annoyed me very often to wait for around 10 seconds to get to the desired position. So, I came up with the idea of a go-to button. You press this button and enter the first character of the entry you want to see. Magically, the list jumps to the first entry that start with the character you entered a few seconds ago. It is just a small feature but it saves me some time and makes the use of Safe even more easy. :-)

It is more than a year ago that I released the last version of JSTUN. During this time I worked on a STUN-server and on an ICE-integration. Most of this was requested by Jive Software. Unfortunately, I was too busy to implement all this in a short period of time. Additionally, I lost contact to the Jive guys. So, after releasing the latest version of JSTUN it it a great moment to get in contact with the great guys from Jive again!

Cheers,
Thomas
Posted by Thomas King at 15:30 2007-11-03 | Trackbacks (0) | Comments (0)

Pictures (General)
I just uploaded a bunch of pictures. One set of the pictures are taken in Montreal during MobiCom, the other one during LoCA in Oberpfaffenhofen. I hope you enjoy the pictures.

And for those of you who are to busy to click through the pictures, I selected the most impressive one for each set: Olympic park at night and a Bavarian folk dancer.

Cheers,
Thomas
Posted by Thomas King at 21:39 2007-10-21 | Trackbacks (0) | Comments (0)

Being at the University of Aarhus, Denmark (Ph.D. studies)
I haven't told you, but I managed to set up a visit at the University of Aarhus, Denmark, a few weeks ago. At Aarhus, I am visiting and working together with Mikkel Baun Kjaergaard. Mikkel is a researcher who works in the same research area as I do. He published many high-impact papers in this area. After Pervasive this year, we talked about doing a joint project. After finalizing the research questions we wanted to answer I applied for an European Science Foundation (ESF) scholarship. Doing all the paperwork is a lot work but this time it was worth the efforts. The ESF granted my scholarship which means all my extra costs due to the stay will be covered.

Mikkel and I started working on our project directly after the ESF showed us green lights. In a first step, we structured the project so that we both could work on it. To organize ourselves we set up telephone conferences every two weeks. Additionally, we met during the LoCA conference for a "working meeting". The second step of the project is my stay at Aarhus. The goal of this stay is to finalize the results we have already produced. Additionally, we are going start writing the results up. The plan is to submit a paper to MobiSys 2008.

Oh, so far I haven't talked about the research questions we want to answer. I really would love to talk about this but I cannot until we submitted the paper. ;-)

Cheers,
Thomas
Posted by Thomas King at 23:57 2007-10-20 | Trackbacks (0) | Comments (0)

Symposium on Location- and Context-Wareness (LoCA) (Ph.D. studies)
Last week, I attended to the 3rd International Symposium on Location- and Context-Awareness to present my paper entitled "Deployment, Calibration, and Measurement Factors for Position Errors in 802.11-based Indoor Positioning Systems". I have to admit that this symposium was one of the most interesting conferences I have ever been. The reason for this is actually twofold: First, the focus of the symposium is quite narrow, and, second, a lot of well-known researchers in the area of 802.11-based positioning systems attended the meeting. Regarding the former, the focus of the symposium perfectly fits my research area which means that nearly every presentation was of interest for me. This is in contrast to a lot of other conferences (e.g., MobiCom) where only a small portion of the talks cover my research interests. The latter means that a lot of cool research work has been presented and we talked a lot about future directions. This was especially interesting for me because we sometimes shared a common view and sometimes we had confronting opinions. :-)
The talk that I liked most is entitled: Towards a Taxonomy for Location Fingerprinting (Mikkel Kjærgaard, Univerisity of Aarhus). This judgement is not influenced by the fact that I will be at Aarhus in the near future. I really liked the cool work Mikkel did because he reviewed and grouped an impressive number of 802.11-based positioning systems. In fact, nearly two years ago I also started categorizing existing research results and I gave up because I wanted to do more practical things. However, I think this work is a great contribution to the community because it summaries and groups the different systems and shows room for future research areas.
And finally, Thomas Strang from DLR did a great job organizing the conference. It was a great pleasure to attend to the conference. See you next time at LoCA 2009. :-)
Cheers,
Thomas
Posted by Thomas King at 11:01 2007-09-28 | Trackbacks (0) | Comments (0)

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