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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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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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!

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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.  These rules of course do not apply to your run-of-the-mill pleasant social conversation, and they shouldn’t.  They’re there for meetings and for advising people.  Here we go:

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While it’s true that Dutch cuisine is the brunt of far too many less-than-flattering jokes, it definitely has its highlights. Ontbijtkoek is a very typically Dutch spiced cake that is often eaten in the morning, whilst Hagelslag is the Dutch word for chocolate sprinkles, which people from around these parts like to use as a bread topping, also mostly in the mornings. By themselves, each of these is an interesting contribution, but probably not a culinary breakthrough.

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The year is 2008.

1. A young Iraqi woman falls in love with a British soldier.
2. Her father hears of this and subsequently, assisted by his two sons, stamps on, suffocates and stabs to death his own daughter.  He is outraged that she has shamed his family in this way.  Furthermore, he claims that she deserved this, as what she did was unacceptable to any Muslim that honours his religion.
3. The father is not prosecuted for his barbaric behaviour.  It is apparently on honour killing, and therefore tolerated.  In this case, the police apparently congratulated him.

Read the full story here.

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(This post was first written in May of 2008, but I’ve been updating it periodically. See also the updates right at the end.)

What are screencasts?

Screencasts refer to video recordings of screen activity, often with narration. These can be used to demonstrate software or to serve as a kind of visual HOWTO. We often make screencasts of software we design in the Medical Visualisation group at the TU Delft to use in presentations at conferences or to distribute online.

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