Kids!  It’s now truly summer over here, which means as much as possible time outside, which means less time available for writing blog posts. However, weeks 24 and 25 of 2010 contained such newsworthy items, that I’m simply forced to trade some sun-light for a bit of TFT exposure. In this post, we talk flowers, PhD defences, scientific talks, funny Js and finally stick figures, so please stick around!

Welcome all to the latest edition of the Weekly Head Voices!  In a bid to get more numbers into my titles (oh who am I kidding, I’m clearly trying to slightly injure or preferably frighten two birds with a single stone, splitting infinitives as I go along), this WHV is dedicated to the EuroVis 2010 conference, which on its part is the reason I spent most of last week in Bordeaux.

For various reasons, I need to do multiple marker tracking in processing with NyARToolkit.  However, with the default NyAR4psg layer between these two, multiple marker tracking is downright hard, and when you get it working, it’s not quite what you expect. After a few days of Java hacking, during which I was very pleasantly surprised with eclipse, I am now pleased to present to you my modifications to the NyAR4psg that makes multiple marker tracking easy! See here:

Hey man, I’m really busy at the moment, but it took me unnecessarily long to get those really hip facebook like, facebook share and retweet buttons everywhere on my blog, so I thought I’d try and save you some time by dropping a quick note on how I did it.

Adding the Facebook Like button functionality wasted the most time, because there are far too many plugins and howtos that claim to work and don’t quite. I ended up using the Like plugin (official wordpress page and plugin website), because it has the best documentation that includes details on all the ways in which things can go wrong, and there are many.  I’m using the IFRAME option, also because that seems to work most of the time.  I had a hard time finding this plugin in the built-in directory, so I downloaded and installed it manually.

Read More

(This edition is about babies, textbook Ph.D. defences and mind-viruses in Snow Crash, all of which can mostly be filed under backyard-philosophy(ish).)

On the theme of striving for The Next Level, my not-quite-1-month-old bundle of joy laughed out loud today for the first time! I’m sure that it was not a false alarm, as I was being my usual comedic genius self (I target the 1 to 3 month-old crowd), and the pattern of stimulus and reaction was just too well-coordinated and sustained to be coincidental.

Read More

In this short howto, I show you how to combine the Ultimate Boot CD (UBCD) with both Knoppix 6.2.1 and Ubuntu 10.04 onto a single USB stick to create An Even More Ultimate Boot Disk (EMUBD)!

UBCD is a bootable CD image that’s fantastic if you’re trying to save grandma’s PC from a certain death, as it contains a number of different bootable utilities for testing memory, testing and low-level repair of hard drives, partition repair, antivirus and so forth. It even contains Parted Magic, a compact linux distribution for fixing partitions, amongst others.

Read More

You might want to skip this post if any of the following is true:

• You don’t know what LaTeX is.
• You don’t care about typesetting theses.
• You’re just generally low on Nerd midi-chlorians.

Recently, we (Mr Cricket and I) helped a good friend (argh, he might already have an acronym assigned,  I should make a glossary for this blog…) typeset his PhD thesis in LaTeX. Sounds straight-forward, were it not for the fact that most of the material was in MS Word to start off with. :)

Read More

Due to the sleep- and concentration disrupting side-effects of a recent fantastic and life-changing event, I have skipped two editions of the Weekly Head Voices.  You’re going to have to bear with me, as it might happen again more than once in the coming months, whilst the ramification of aforementioned event matures some more and finally decides that those funny hairy creatures often occupying the same spaces that she does do deserve some rest.  Sometimes.

Read More

Part of this post, looking back on week 16 of 2010, was produced in a (I wish I could say speeding) train with my aging Nokia E71 tethered (by bluetooth) to my netbook. The T-Mobile unlimited mobile internet package is unfortunately still limited to 384 Kbit/s (see my speedtest.net results), but I’m attached to it for its reasonable policy on internet use outside of NL.

In any case, during the past week I enjoyed 14 hours of meetings and completed 22 GTD tasks spread over 11 projects. I also tasted fresh lamp-post for the first time, and it was delicious:

Welcome all, to the 20th edition of the Weekly Head Voices, now with ever so slightly updated title style!  Let’s just call it Rotterdam-style for now. In any case, this edition looks back on weeks 14 and 15 of the year 2010, with news about a boat and the people on it, two more accepted student papers (I’m just SO proud at the moment), and the International Symposium on Biomedical Imaging (ISBI) 2010 that took place this past week in, you guessed it, Rotterdam.

Read More