Offf has just ended and, instead of leaving these notes just in my notebook, I'll put them out here, possibly with some extra information. These are just selected small notes from what I have seen and heard at Offf. 

I just attended the Most Pixels Ever workshop by Daniel Shiffman at the OFFF festival. Although it was a very short workshop (2 hours) I think it was a good workshop and time well spent.

Most of the times the workshops I attend are just excuses to start working on something and this one was no different. I don't have access to big screens like the ones at IAC, but we, at the School of Arts (UCP), do have a lot of small screens that can be used to create something interesting.

The MPE library is rather simple (which is good) and it basically does time and space synchronization among the several screens, which means that you can create a program that uses a display are that spans multiple physical displays.  It is well described here, but I'll summarize how it works:

for the past bandwidths...

This discussion seems to have started with a statement by Roger Ebert (film critic) that video games can never be art. Kellee Santiago picked up that statement and made a case against it in a TEDx talk, which motivated a response from Ebert.

Even without reading any of the arguments, saying that "video games can never be art" strikes me as the same as saying that "a coat hanger can never be art" or "a urinol can never be art" or "a robot can never be art". I know I'm being a bit unfair here because what Ebert says is that, in principle, video games cannot be art. Any object can be incorporated in a piece of art, but can a class of objects be considered art a priori? Ebert seems to think so. I disagree.

I really like Google Chrome.  I use GMail, Docs, Calendar, etc, all synchronized with my computer for offline access and Chrome integrates very nicely with all this. My bookmarks are also synchronized through Google Docs so that my browser looks the same at work or at home. And I've increasingly been installing and using some of the Google Chrome Extensions for managing tasks, the calendar, and lots other stuff.

One of the latest extensions I installed sent a chill up my spine, though. 

I have just been to the 5th International Workshop on Context Aware Mobile Systems (CAMS09) workshop presenting a paper entitled: "A framework for context-aware adaptation in public displays".

Here is a small set of notes from the workshop.

I don't know why SpringerLink does not provide the BibTeX for its entries, but fortunately there is a web tool that converts the Springer link into BibTeX: Springer Bibtex Converter. You just have to paste the link into the textbox and submit it. There is even a bookmarklet so all you have to do is to open the Springer page and press a bookmark to convert it to BibTeX. Nice. Thank you William Niu.

I have already posted about bibliographic references with Jabref, and how it could be used to create a list of published papers to include in a web page. 

However, there's a far better way to keep a list of publications on your personal web page if you use BibTeX (and you should, Google uses it!): Bibtexbrowser.