My novel Android Smartphone Star X18i (ordered from that particular shop), running Android 2.3.4, has been rooted using the instructions in this thread: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?p=18615502#post8615502 (method 2b, using the zergRush exploit, v3). Nice work for the script, I just copied the instructions step-by-step. The phone itself seems to be a Sony Xperia X10 clone.

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I recently bought a Navin Minihomer for geocaching, geo-logging and wayfinding. Really nice device, and I got it to work under linux using gpsbabel using the following instructions:

• Zeroth, see if there’s a /dev/ttyUSB* node created when plugging in the device. If not, compile the respective kernel module; it’s under USB support — USB serial converter — Prolific …, the module is called pl2303.
• First, get the gpsbabel sources (currently 1.4.2) from gpsbabel.org or grab the CVS version
• For the source (non-cvs) version, apply the patch written by Josef Reisinger and linked in this thread: http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/attachment.php?list_name=gpsbabel-code&message_id=4CD96A99.9000603%40aol.com&counter=1
• compile and install
• have a look at the sources (the patch) to see what functionality is available. That is, look at the files prefixed with miniHomer in the xmldoc directory.
• Feel free to use the bash script below to use the functions of the Navin Minihomer.
• Drop me an email with comments, if necessary, email address is in the bash script.

The script below supports

The first command erases the log, the second can set the appropriate waypoint in the order they appear when cycling through the miniHomer’s menu (House to Bar) with lat/long in decimal degrees separated by spaces, the third reads the device’s log and splits it by day, and the fourth initializes the device to a certain speed (didn’t have to use it so far). The bash script requires setting the path to the gpsbabel (patched) binary and the USB device. It certainly works for me, except that gpsbabel produces strange gpx files where the dates of the points are set to sometime in the year 2031. I don’t care at the moment, it seems to be just a fixed shift. The last (dump) command just grabs the log dump from the logger, writes this to a file and processes it further, even correcting for the somewhat strange date by setting a negative offset of -172032 hours. Gpsbabel segfaults first, but still writes the log (but misses the waypoints in the dump, which I don’t need anyway).

Here’s the script: minihomertool bash script. It’s certainly not perfect, doesn’t care about errors and could clearly be more elegant, but whoever wants to can customize it.

There’s more information on the German znex site: http://www.znex.de/downloads.html.

In Kürze wird, nach langer Vorbereitungszeit, das Buch „Computational Intelligence“ erscheinen, an dem ich als Koautor beteiligt bin. Insbesondere die buchbegleitenden Webseiten unter computational-intelligence.eu entstammen meiner Feder.

Last week I handed in the first 228-page draft of what’s probably going to be
my thesis. Let’s see what the reviewers say, I hope there are not too many
fundamental issues with that draft.

My thesis proceeds as expected and planned. The second main chapter is finished and off to the first reviewer, while the first main chapter is currently being written. The experiments are currently running on the lab machines (which are much quicker now than half a year ago using R — new hardware) and the plots will be generated soon. Time for applications. Deadlines seem to work :-)

The two latest papers of mine have been accepted at SCAI and ICDM. And there’s another upcoming journal article for (likely) GeoInformatica and the upcoming book of our working group on Computational Intelligence.

Those were the days …

This year’s going to be the deadline for my PhD thesis. It seems like I’m nearly there. A few things are left to be done and upcoming.

At the moment there’s a journal article for GeoInformatica about the spatial variable importance stuff I’ve developed based on Alex‘ suggestions. The results are such that they (at the moment) fit nicely into my thesis. Anyway, the results have an open outcome, but it looks as if an additional variable Elevation introduced into the regression models for yield prediction has a major influence on the quality of the prediction itself. I’m going to run a few more data sets through the models and see whether I keep getting similar results and will further try to falsify my hypothesis.

Then there’s the SCAI 2011 conference in Trondheim, where I’ll hand in an article about the spatial clustering I’ve developed. And I’ll try to meet a few other people while I’m there to see if there are any further postdoc opportunities at NTNU.

My own workshop, Data Mining in Agriculture 2011, is going to take place in conjunction with ICDM’2011, which is going to be held in NYC, US.

And then there’s the book Computational Intelligence of which I’m an author, due by the end of March.

Four yellow Ortliebs

I’m taking ten weeks off, starting tomorrow. I’ll have my bike with me,
four yellow Ortlieb bags and a small backpack. Direction: North.

I’ll be back in the middle of October, when the winter term starts.

I’m back from a research trip to Melbourne, Australia, that emanated from a successful grant application with the DAAD/GO8 under their cooperation scheme. Mine was the first trip to make and I visited the research group headed by Saman Halgamuge at the University of Melbourne. Actually, I had been working with them during my undergraduate studies for half a year in (southern hemisphere) summer 2004/2005. We made some arrangements concerning the exchange of students and research staff for 2008/2009 and my next visit is about to take place in March 2009. Of course, we (i.e. Mimi and I) also did some sightseeing and bushwalking in/on nearby Tasmania — I’m fond of that island, and it was the second time that I’ve been there. However, the time lag is ten hours at the moment, not to mention the delta T of around 30K between Magdeburg and Melbourne.

Having returned on Monday, I went back to work on Wednesday because I definitely wanted to see/hear Christian Borgelt’s lecture on Frequent Pattern Mining. The topic is quite interesting and the subtopic of Frequent Graph Mining, applied to chemical molecules, really has been worthwile to me since I’ve always been very interested in chemistry and also had chosen it as my subsidiary subject during my undergraduate studies.

I’ve returned from the Specialist’s Group on Artificial Intelligence of the British Computer Society’s meeting at Peterhouse College, Cambridge, UK. The event was quite worthwile, where undoubtedly the best speaker was Max Bramer himself. On Monday he gave a talk to PhD students on „How to survive a viva“. Since he often has been and will be an external supervisor or reviewer of PhD students‘ theses, he told us what he thinks is important in the thesis, how to write it, what and what not to do and so on. His talk was riddled with hilarious real examples of what he saw in thesis drafts or even final theses. That event, even featured as a free event to PhD students, was actually included for the first time at the conference before the main conference began on Tuesday.
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Eine Auswahl der von verschiedenen Personen erstellten Hochzeitsfotos ist hier zu finden: http://www.georgruss.de/photos.

Dieselbe Seite kann auch unter http://photos.mariapatrunky.de erreicht werden.