Howwwwdy-hoooo!

Depending on the particular reality that you find yourself in, which itself could be a function of how hard you’ve been partying, we have now left week #38 of 2009 behind us.  I took a significant part of this week off to spend some quality time with visiting family.  On Tuesday, I popped by my work (that’s the TU Delft for the uninitiated) to pick up some stuff for my planned official visit to MeVis in Bremen on Wednesday.  Two noteworthy points spring to mind:

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HI KIDS!!

You thought I’d forgotten all about you, dintcha?  Nope, not that easily.

Because this edition of the Weekly Head Voices is the most unorganised ever, the trick of bolding the most representative words in each paragraph simply won’t fly.  So instead I’ll just highlight some random words, and you can pretend that they actually mean something.  Think of it as a post-modernistic exercise in missing the point.  I’ll try and be more organised next week.

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Dear readers,

The time has come for the second installment of the exciting new Weekly Head Voices feature!  My PR people tell me that this is a roaring success and that I am rapidly on my way to becoming an A-List blogger. My therapist tells me that I should find a good psychiatrist.

Before starting, I’d like to show the following photo (will get back to it later):

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(Badly) inspired by some dude’s weekly I’m-finishing-my-PhD-blog, sent to me by the infamous francoism, I have decided that you, dear reader(s) (hey mom!), have the right to be exposed more regularly to the voices in my head.  So, in order to supplement my recent posting frequency of once per month (my global frequency seems to be higher: 349 posts over 98 months in total), I’m going to post every single week with an exceptionally entertaining summary of the week’s highlights.  I do reserve the right to slip up now and then, or to stop completely when I feel like it. :)  You then have the right to taunt me in the comments of this, or the latest post at that time.

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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.  It also links to the “old” Python 2.5 VTK 5.4.1 binaries.

I’ve made available my home-baked VTK 5.4.2 Windows binaries.  These have the new-and-improved version of my python-exception-patches integrated (more about this in a future post; a serious dead-lock has been fixed and as a side-effect, you can now run multiple VTK pipelines in different threads!) and have been built with Visual Studio 2008 (9.0) SP1 on Windows XP SP3 with full Python 2.6 support.  Get the binaries (or my patched source) from the two links below.  You want the binaries if you want to use VTK from Python.

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Courtesy of an invitation by Prof. Bernhard Preim and the CARS (Computer Assisted Radiology and Surgery) organization to give the Visualization and Virtual Reality in Medicine tutorial together with the good professor, I got to go to CARS 2009 in (you guessed it) Berlin.  It was an honour and a pleasure to present this tutorial together with the author of The Book currently defining my research field.

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On Friday I returned, by jet-powered flying device, from Yet Another Visit To Berlin.  :)  Berlin still exudes cool like nothing else, and I got to spend my time there in the company of more than 190 other Visualisation people, many of whom have become friends over the past years.  The three days were filled with presentations, but more importantly (sorry presenters!) good conversations, new friends (contacts?) and not too much sleep.  This was, without a doubt, my best Eurovis conference so far!

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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 5.4 (actually build from a CVS VTK-5-4-1 tag checkout) Windows binaries.  These have the new-and-improved version of my python-exception-patches integrated (more about this in a future post; a serious dead-lock has been fixed and as a side-effect, you can now run multiple VTK pipelines in different threads!) 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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I was mistakenly under the impression that, at least in my social circles, the whole vaccination issue had been put completely to rest, but based on the number of serious questions that I’ve been asked recently, this unfortunately does not seem to be the case.

For those of you who don’t have time, I’ll cut to the chase immediately:

Yes, you simply must vaccinate your children.  This is the best and safest choice, for both your child and your fellow humans.

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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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