As mentioned in the previous episode of this Exciting and Inspiring series, I was on my way to Magdeburg (that’s in Germany) for a one-month micro-sabbatical. It seems that almost everyone has a different idea of what a sabbatical actually entails. Some seem to think that it’s a different kind of vacation, others think that it’s a strange kind of very long Sunday.

In an academic’s case, a sabbatical usually refers to a period of time spent away from the usual place of work to acquire some new skill, to perform some serious thinking or to try one’s hand at coming up with and performing some “own” research, whatever that may mean.  I have come here to do mostly the latter. Secondary but important perks include getting to know the people and the work of an allied research group better, in this case the the Lehrstuhl für Visualisierung in the Institut für Simulation und Graphik of the Otto-von-Guericke-Universität Magdeburg.  Tertiary perks include improving my non-existent Deutsch, but that’s not going terribly well, although I have learned how to say “Schönes Wochenende” pretty convincingly though!

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The past months have been hectic. Since the start of 2009 I have initiated, developed and run the brand new TU Delft Medical Visualisation M.Sc. course (cutting-edge learning methods with integrated lectures and hands-on exercises, more on this in a future post), released DeVIDE 9.1, worked on bunches of research proposals, co-authored articles and setup new research projects. This happened in parallel with my normal work duties.   The lecture/workshop part of the course is now done, proposals and articles were all submitted last week and newly setup projects are coming along nicely.  It’s a strange feeling sitting here on a Saturday morning not having to work towards some deadline:  I’d sort of gotten used to working 7-day weeks.

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I thought I had everything any human could ever desire.  Turns out I was completely wrong.  Please please please get me one of these for my birthday:

This will work especially well here in the canals of Delft.  I’ll be able to arrive at work or just go about town in ultimate style.  YEAH!

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DNS changes are  still propagating for various domains, but this post is definitely coming to you from my new home at WebFaction!

Over the past two days, I’ve migrated a number of domains that I host from anhosting to WebFaction.  At anhosting I had 30 G of disc, 750 G of bandwidth (seems they’ve gone all unlimited now) and great support for a few dollars a month (that’s about 10 eurocents :).  At WebFaction I get 20 G less disc space and 150 G less bandwidth for some dollars more per month!!  Great deal right?!

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Here’s my nerdy DIY tool and tip for the day: With a single sheet of A4 (or letter) paper, you can fold a sleeve for any CD or DVD.  This is ideal for those CDs lying around where they shouldn’t, and also for gifts of pirated software and music (harr harr).

I’ve made a web-app (CGI) that will generate a PDF with folding lines and labeling text, including titles, descriptions and track listings, that you can print out and fold to protect your most beloved optical media in a unique yet stylish fashion.  Click here to go to the webapp, please come back to this posting to leave a comment!

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So you’ve upgraded some of your machines to Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex, argh) and you’re really very happy with yourself.  That is, until you try to run your trusty unison synchronisation scripts and notice that due to the version mismatch between unison on 8.10 (2.27.57) and unison on 7.10 (2.13.16), you are screwed.

Because I like you, I’ve made available my quick and dirty backport of unison 2.27.57 (the Ubuntu 8.10 version) to Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) on i386.  Get the DEBs by clicking HERE!

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Taking a hint from Joe, aka Swimgeek, here’s a summary of my life since the previous time we spoke:

• The VCBM 2008 workshop, my first attempt at playing the organising conference chair, went swimmingly.  Two days of solid presentations, a lovely dinner at Van der Dussen (no Ronald McDonald in sight!) and meeting up with many old friends.  I stopped stressing during the conference dinner.
• I joined the ranks of the intelligentsia (As opposed to the millions of plebs with iPhones – oh stop whining and look at the stats.  Can’t find the stats?  Go figure out how to copy and paste, then get back to me. :) ) and acquired a Nokia E71.  Best. Gadget. EVAR.
• Had a fan-tas-tic holiday in South Africa.  Had profound conversations and the most raucous get-togethers with best friends and family.  Realised again how extremely lucky I am with people I’m this close with, on two different continents.  Linked up with my dad for the first time in too many years, which was cool.
• Migrated my extremely complex todo system (I’m a foaming-at-the-mouth GTD follower) from todoist to a local installation of the open-source RoR-based Tracks software.  Todoist is really cool, but it’s very much deadline-oriented, whilst in the GTD world deadlines are just so passé.  DAMN I’m with it.
• My laptop was sort of stolen and then returned 5 minutes later.  Besides the acute trauma that this caused, it got me wondering about the security of the Windows XP Encrypted File System thingy that I use to encrypt some of the more sensitive, err, documents on my laptop.  On Windows 2000, the fact that on a local install the administrator was the default data recovery agent (DRA), made it possible to decrypt a user’s files without having to crack that user’s password.  On a local install of XP, this is fortunately NOT the case.  I repeat, on a local install of XP there is no default recovery policy.  In other words, a laptop thief needs to crack your password to decrypt your EFS encryption.  You can double check this by downloading efsinfo and running it on your files with “efsinfo /u /r your_files”.  It should confirm that there’s no recovery agent.  You should also check the strength of your Windows passwords with ophcrack.  Your EFS is only as strong as the user password protecting it.  After my little episode, I’ve deleted most of those sensitive, err, documents from my laptop (they’re duplicated on a server at home) and encrypted even larger parts of my laptop hard drive, just in case.

Now I’m supposed to conclude this blow-by-blow with something profound.  I know, I’ll end with a quote attributed to Plato that I first saw in the PhD thesis of a friendly colleague.  At the time it made quite an impression on me:

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This page will always link to my latest blog post with VTK Windows binaries, so you know you have the most recent ones.  The latest post is:

• Python 2.6 enabled VTK 5.4 Windows binaries

You might still be interested in the older Python 2.5 builds:

• Python 2.5 enabled VTK 5.4 Windows binaries.

However, if you’re really serious about VTK, ITK and perhaps even a kitchen sink, and you would like the choice between 32bit and 64bit on both Windows and Linux, you should really be looking at the DeVIDE Runtime Environment, or DRE.

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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.

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Wow, wow, wow.

As hinted to in a previous post, I was on my way to Brazil.

The hint took more concrete shape with me visiting Dr. Rosane Minghim and colleagues at the Instituto de Ciências Matemáticas e de Computação (ICMC) of the Universidade de São Paulo.  One of the many perks of my job is that I get to travel (nice) and meet many exceptionally cool people (great):  The week in Brazil was an extreme example of that.  Shortly after setting foot on the South American continent for the first time, I started running into them.  A whole series of amazingly warm and engaging contacts with people that I had mostly never seen before.  Every lunch and every dinner from day one was either at someone’s house, with their family, or somewhere in the city, at a restaurant (I’ll get back to the foody bits later…), in the company of interesting and very social people.  I had many profound conversations, a healthy percentage being entirely unrelated to work.  All of this meaningful activity had a definite effect on my perception of time: By the end of the week, it felt like I had been there and known the people for much longer than possible in 7 days.  You would be correct in guessing that I’m still slightly stunned. :)

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