Over this weekend I've been working hard trying to finish up a chapter I'm writing on Linux and Bluetooth for a book. I've found the writing hard going. So in between bouts of scribbling I decided to hack on a fun application to show at ETech next week.

Here's the results. BlueFOAF is an application that scans your list of friends from your FOAF file and allows you to associate them with nearby discoverable Bluetooth devices. If their device is discoverable you will be shown their name and picture in a buddy list.

It's a nice toy and might have some useful applications. Figure out when your boss is in the office. Find friends at a conference or in a bar.

Without further ado, here's some screenshots. The first shows the "all friends" view. The ones with the blue triangles have been linked to Bluetooth devices. The second shows the view of friends whose devices are discoverable. The third is the about box, because I like the cute little faces.

BlueFOAF scans every 5 minutes, but you can force it to scan sooner. How does it find the pictures? It looks for rdfs:seeAlso entries in your FOAF file pointing to your friends' files. It then looks for foaf:img properties in your friends' FOAF files. Once initialized from the web it caches all this data.

You can get BlueFOAF from my subversion repository. You'll need: Python and Redland's Python extension, the ImageMagick tools for convert, and libbtctl and gnome-bluetooth checked out from GNOME CVS.

Future directions for this work could include Gossip integration or porting to smartphones like my P800.