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Python 2.5 enabled VTK 5.2 Windows binaries

cpbotha — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 18:28:42 +0000

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.

Pleasure Apparatus 2008

cpbotha — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 21:03:21 +0000

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!

midlife crisis symptom #2351

cpbotha — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 17:12:10 +0000

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…

all your mail belongs to us

cpbotha — Tue, 13 Mar 2007 20:41:52 +0000

My webhoster secretly disabled catch-all email addresses for email.Â 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.Â If you left a comment on this blog, or somehow have the feeling that I’m ignoring you, please resend your mail.

Livejournal blog imported

cpbotha — Sun, 04 Mar 2007 23:16:51 +0000

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!

Halleluja, internet!

cpbotha — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 11:56:08 +0000

Four days ahead of time, the ADSL has been activated at my new house. I’ve been migrated to a different network operator (I used to be on the Tiscali network, now on BBNed) and the line has been “opened”. Distance to the exchange seems to have quite an effect, I’m connected at 5472 kbps downstream and 928 kbps upstream. According to http://pcdb.bbned.nl/, I’m 1.6km from the exchange. A rough calculation on my downstream attenuation of 46db, yields an estimated distance of 3.3km. I’ll sort this out later to make sure that it’s just the distance working me over, and not some misconfiguration somewhere.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m really very appreciative of my prodigal link. Thanks to the generosity of the TU Delft, my gracious employer, it’s costing me the grand total of 5 euro-pesos per month, so I’m really not going to complain.

I have to go now, there are ZILLIONS of new torrents that need my love and attention.

Internet at the new house

cpbotha — Thu, 15 Feb 2007 14:08:55 +0000

One of the complications of moving is that one’s internet connection can take its sweet time to catch up with one’s new location. For the past two weeks, I’ve been living off 64kbit/s capped UMTS (i.e. shit-slow mobile internet) at the new place. It looks like I might be rescued in another week or so by my old and generous link!

Marvel at the glory of my ADSL order status:

Oh brother!

cpbotha — Tue, 13 Feb 2007 19:22:16 +0000

Oh joyful day, it turns out my favourite younger brother has a weblog. He’s been very clever and hidden it behind all kinds of noms de plume and other mysterious things so that he can blab about whatever he wants without fear of damaging his good professional name. That is, once he manages to build up a good professional name.

Geez, I crack myself up.

In anycase, go to The Curtain to read all about what floats my little brother’s boat (as well as his friends’ boats, as far as I can see). As far as I can surmise, it’s mostly about sex, drugs and fast cars so far. Just my cup of tea, let’s see if I can score a poster account to do my part on the rock-’n-roll bits.

No related posts.

DeVIDE finally on MacOS-X

cpbotha — Sun, 01 Oct 2006 00:37:09 +0000

The entirely too resourceful Michael Scarpa managed to get DeVIDE running on the Mac!! See the screenshot below (click to enlarge).

In related news, I’m working on a script that should be able to download, configure and build a complete DeVIDE development environment from scratch (including Python 2.5, wxPython 2.6, VTK, ITK, and the kitchen sink). More on this later.

Amazingly crap print support in Ubuntu 6.06

cpbotha — Sun, 03 Sep 2006 17:19:52 +0000

Hi there kids!

Remember, all operating systems suck completely, even Loonix, the shareware system written by Luunis Torvaldez, the Mexican hacker responsible for other shareware greats, such as the desktop environment Gloom.

Because this is a long(ish) text, I’ll subtly hint at the conclusion: print support in Ubuntu sucks really badly, which is all the more crappy because Ubuntu is otherwise a fine distribution. Now back to my story…

In any case, today I lost a few precious hours of my life (I really had more important things to do) trying to configure the printer on my Ubuntu 6.06 server as a public / guest access printer. In other words, anyone attached to my network should be able to print to this printer.

First attempt: get the Ubuntu CUPS installation to accept print requests from remote clients via IPP. This was working just fine under CentOS 4.x, thank you. After much gnashing of teeth and editing of config files (necessary “allow” clauses and what not), clients could get printer status and could even access the admin pages on :631, but could not print. Nothing helpful in the log files, even with higher log levels. It turns out that Ubuntu doesn’t really support this setup: they prefer that one comes in through Samba.

Second attempt: configure the samba printer for public access. This FINALLY worked when I set “security = share”, but the samba manuals warn against this and strongly discourage its use. ARGH. Can you configure a public printer with security = user? It seems not.

So, Linux has been around in some form or another for 15 years… every year we are promised that “This year will be the year of Linux! Ready for the desktop I say!” and every year it still sucks in new and original ways. Yes, nerdy administrators itching to leave a comment, Linux works well if you’re an *nally retentive git with nothing else to do but read manuals and browse source code (or just an otherwise well-adjusted student with too much time), but for the rest of us with Real Work and Other Things To Do, this just doesn’t cut it.