DOT's SPACE

I have just finished my review round for the ITU-T Forum Alumni Forum for the upcoming ITU Asia event. This forum invites alumni of the youth forum of the ITU-T Forum to return to the event in order to showcase how the Youth forum has changed their lives.

Reading through the submissions does make one think. In our increased (research) hype to find the new and better Future Internet, socio-economic issues are increasingly pounded on. It somehow reminds me of other ‘hype’ areas that emerged over time to secure better funding by including certain terms in your application.

But here, in these reviews of lives changed through ICT, you can actually read the socio-economic impact that ICT can have. One does not need to study but merely to read and listen. And then, it seems to me that our western attitude to technology has put us in the position that we often cannot comprehend the simplest advances that could be brought by technology – just because we have the technology already. It is astonishing to read how much these young adults want to commit their knowledge and expertise to make a difference with their technology literacy in order to better the situation of their fellow citizens. I have hardly heard this in our culture where the focus of technology, in particular recent Internet and mobile advances, seems to be consumption of more and better for oneself mainly – albeit often hard to comprehend as to what ‘better’ is really targetted here. Sustainability and advance of human life seems often still secondary, at best.

Having read these reviews really makes you think what needs to be done to change our attitude here…

It has been quiet around NORS, the open source remote sensing platform. I reported before on this blog on NORS but my departure from Nokia (the ‘N’ in NORS stands for Nokia) stopped the NORS development, at least temporarily.

Until now: I started developing again, this time in my remaining free time (if there is really anything like that). Originally, I had planned to change the name to something else, carrying over the copyright notices and all. But then, I decided to leave the name as it is. This is not only because NORS was published and therefore changing the name might disrupt. But another reason is also that Nokia, after all, agreed to open the platform (although I avoid thinking too much about the pain I had to go through for this) and I want to acknowledge this by keeping the name.

So what will be new: first off, I removed all (sensor) handlers that were based on Nokia-internal developments. These are of no real use for anybody out there. Examples are the motion band (which does not really exist outside Nokia Research) and some proprietary SSI implementations over internal USB. But apart from removing certain functionality, there will also be new functionality. Currently, I am adding calendar events as internal sensors, if you will, and also will add a handler for reading the Alive Technology heart monitor. This device allows for connecting an ECG sensor via Bluetooth. The protocol is proprietary but available for me to implement in NORS. Integration in NORS can then enable certain medical and sport scenarios. Personally, this work will support some of the monitoring tasks of Dana’s PhD at Essex University.

Also, I’m investigating to re-implement the SymbianServer that comes as an executable in the NORS package (I did not manage to open source the source code for this). The server is rather trivial in functionality (a simple TCP server with string operations) for somebody familiar with native S60 programming knowledge, which excludes me still. Through re-implementing this server, I would like to extend the range of information I can obtain from the mobile device, such as battery level, cellID, accelerometer (on phones like the N95, N96, …) etc. But this will still take a little while. If you are familiar with native S60 and think you might be able to implement this, please do drop me an email. I would appreciate some help on this.

On the server side, there will be little change. I am thinking of putting some SQL support in the code, i.e., dumping incoming notifications into an SQL database. We’ll see.

Oh, one other change will appear in the new NORS package: I will cease the support for the IMP platform, e.g., implemented in the former Nokia N12 devices. Although I liked using NORS on these embedded devices, not many people are seriously using these and they’re hard to get through Aplicom Inc.

On a final note, I have no real firm timeline yet when to release a new NORS package. But it will be within the next two or three months, I would think.

You see the ads now everywhere: mobile broadband for a tenner (that is pound – convert in your local equivalent). I am not going in the misleading bit of calling largely 2 or 2.5G coverage ‘broadband’. It is more the ‘mobile’ and the therefore created perception of everywhere that bothers me.

Take this example. I am sitting on a train to London – the main East England line into the capital fully packed with commuters who increasingly have these funny ‘broadband’ dongles hanging on their laptops. Trying for a similar experience on my mobile, I must sadly realise that the coverage is appaling. Large parts of the line are barely or not at all covered. I knew this somehow before which is why I never plan to take conference calls on the train. But now watching the signal really makes me realize how bad it really is.
So much for mobile…

P.s.: when trying to get people to use trains and other alternative transport it would be good to complement this with proper connectivity means. I must admit that other countries are significantly better though (while yet others are much worse)… Now trying to send this blog