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You can always check my Latest VTK Windows binaries page to make sure you have the latest blog posting and hence the latest binaries.

I’ve made available my home-baked VTK 5.2 Windows binaries.  These have my special python-exception-patches integrated and have been built with Visual Studio 2005 (8.0) SP1 on Windows XP2 with full Python 2.5 support.  Get the binaries (or my patched source) by going here.  You want the binaries if you want to use VTK from Python.

IMPORTANT: you might have to install the MS VS2005 vcredist_x86 package (free!) if you want to use these DLLs (thanks Jelle for pointing this out).  This might not be necessary if you already have one or more of the MS development environments installed.

Please leave a comment on this blog posting if you use these or just hate them. It’s almost like postcard-ware, but with blog comments. Please also link to this page and not directly to the download location, thanks!

To use this from Python, you need to add the following to your PATH:

• d:\opt\VTK\bin

You also need to add all of the above to PYTHONPATH, as well as the following:

• d:\opt\VTK\lib\site-packages

… where d:\opt is the drive and directory where you unpacked the ZIP file.
Once you’ve done this and logged out and in again, “import vtk” should work at the Python prompt. Shameless plug: you can use my free envedit software to do the environment editing. It beats the default XP editing thingy.

As I mentioned, no lamented on, in this post, it was high time for a new computer in my life.  On Saturday June 14, 2008, I managed to acquire the necessary components to construct my latest computer machine.  For you viewing pleasure, I took the photo below of the various parts lasciviously arranged:

Niiiiice!

After a truly delectable BBQ with Really Good Friends, I set about putting the beast together.  At 3:00 AM it purred into life with Ubuntu Hardy Heron 8.04 x86_64: 45nm Penryn quad-core Q9450 2.6 GHz CPU on a P35-based Asus P5KC, 8 GB of RAM, GeForce 8800 GT with 512 MB, Seagate Barracude 500 GB 7200 RPM HDD, all enclosed in an Antec Sonata III Piano Black case.  All in all quite affordable at 925 eurobucks, but definitely a beast of a machine (probably at least until the end of July!).

Now I can do all sorts of sick things, like running Windows XP 64 bit in a virtual machine:

I’m the coolest nerd on my block!

I’m going to keep this post short and sweet by making use of a visual aid:

The line-up includes Tool, Smashing Pumpkins, Nine Inch Nails (I’m going there for Trent), Sonic Youth, Lacuna Coil, Iggy Pop and some pimply new kids on the block, such as Kaiser Chiefs and Fall Out Boy.

Now I just have to decide whether I’m going to grow that festival moustache or not…

My webhoster secretly disabled catch-all email addresses for email.  Coincidentally, this is how I was forwarding everything to my gmail account, which means that all mail to my domain bounced for at least a few days.  If you left a comment on this blog, or somehow have the feeling that I’m ignoring you, please resend your mail.

Because I could, I went and exported all posts and comments from my old Livejournal blog (it was still alive!) with ljarchive and imported everything into this here shiny new weblog. If you’re into that type of thing, you can now go back as far as May 2001, or read this post about the BRAND SPANKING NEW Mozilla 0.9.9 release (by a very naive idealist open source standards zealot), or even this gem lamenting the supernatural amounts of rain in NL!

On the topic of retrospection, don’t forget to check out the post that finally revealed my fascination with rubber-hosed justice!