SCM NFC readers for testing and development

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I just recently received two additional NFC readers at work for further testing and development. The USB stick is the SCL3711 model, the bigger one the SCL010. There is no support for the SCL010 in libnfc at the moment, so I will have to find a way to use this reader for our purpose of communicating with android NFC phones (we will soon order the Galaxy Nexus in addition to the Nexus S we already have). The SCL3711 is supported by the libnfc and even recommended by the developers (see http://www.libnfc.org/community/topic/331/shopping-guide/ ).

EDIT: I posted this because I got some questions regarding which NFC reader to buy for development. I’m going with the recommended one for now and will post more information when I get to use it.

Stanford courses: AI, ML, DB

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Update: Online courses are now available here: Coursera

Thanks to Matias Piipari’s post on Google+ I stumbled upon the following three Stanford courses which are available to the general public this fall:

Artifical Intelligence: http://www.ai-class.com/
Machine learning: http://www.ml-class.org/
Databases: http://www.db-class.com/

The lectures will be streamed online. Even if you have no time to do the homework or the exams, it’s still a good chance to get some insight into these topics. You will get a statement of accomplishment in the end, signed by the professors.

NFC with the Nexus S and ACR122 Reader

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The norwegian Computerworld published an article about a project in which I am involved. The project is part of the current research of Mohammad Derawi, a PhD student from Gjøvik/Norway. The goal of the project is to combine biometric (gait) authentication and token based authentication via NFC.

I have been working on the NFC part in my spare time. We had access to a Google Nexus S smartphone (which is the first android phone with NFC technology) and an ACR122 NFC Reader from Advanced Card Systems Ltd. We used the latest android version (2.3.4) and SDK. On the desktop side we used libnfc and libnfc-llcp (which is a work in progress). The following section provides a short description of how to set up a one-way communication from the phone to the reader. Continue reading →

Group chats with iChat and Google Talk

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I was wondering how to join chat rooms with iChat and Google Talk until I found this blog post. The easiest way to create the lengthy chat room name is to use a shell script TextExpander snippet:

#!/bin/bash
echo private-chat-`uuidgen`@groupchat.google.com

In iChat:

  1. press ⌘+R
  2. Select your Google Talk account in the top
  3. expand the snippet in the room name field
  4. press Return