My new home on the interwebs

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 :).

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A nicer foldable paper CD cover generator

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.

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Backport of unison 2.27.57 to Ubuntu 7.10

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.

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What I did this, err, summer

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.

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Latest VTK Windows binaries

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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Python 2.5 enabled VTK 5.2 Windows binaries

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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A taste of brilliant Brazil

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.

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Life update

Yesterday I had the pleasure of attending the M.Sc. defence of a probably soon-to-be-famous medical imaging researcher :) and the additional pleasure of chatting with a bunch of exceptionally pleasant BIGR people. In passing, it was mentioned that I had not updated my blog in a while. Together with the fact that my most recent posting (before this one) has to do with new computer hardware (blargh) and definitely doesn’t count as one of the better contributions in the illustrious history of this weblog, and therefore shouldn’t remain on the front page for too long, this has finally convinced me that I should definitely make a new posting.

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Pleasure Apparatus 2008

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.

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The art of effective verbal communication

At work, a large part of my day is taken up by speaking. I spend a significant amount of time in meetings of some sort, both where other people are primarily talking and also where I have to talk most of the time. Because I started noticing that many of these hundreds of thousands of words were being applied less effectively than they could have, I began trying to derive some rules of thumb for effective verbal communication.

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