Dear readers, although you remain anonymous, I now know quite reliably that there are slightly more than two of you. This knowledge makes me insanely happy. Thank you very much for taking the time to glance at my posts every so often.

I’ve added three hopefully useful plugins to my WordPress (best blogging software EVAR) setup:

1. Almost at the bottom of the right sidebar, you’ll find the section “Friends’ latest blogs”. If you have a blog, it’s probably in my Google Reader (best aggregator EVAR, just try it, you’ll fall in love with it), in which case your latest posts will appear, via Google Reader, on my sidebar. I’ve modified the Google Reader plugin so that it can show an arbitrary feed, not just your Shared Items (see my comments on that post for more information).
2. Right below that, I’ve added an “RSS Feed” and an “Add to Google Reader” button. If you don’t subscribe to my blog yet, but would like to, simply click on the latter if you’d like to use Google Reader to keep up to date with my postings, or the former if you’d prefer to use some other aggregator. For those of you not using aggregators yet: if you regularly read two or more blogs, it’s definitely worth using a good aggregator. This help text explains what it means to subscribe to a feed. I’ve used the Subscribe Me plugin for this.
3. You can now also subscribe by email to the comments of a particular posting by clicking the “Notify me of followup comments via e-mail” checkbox when posting a comment. If anybody else adds new comments to that particular posting, you’ll get notified by email. You can easily unsubscribe at anytime. I’ve used the Subscribe to Comments plugin for this.

I have one more confession: It seems that I’m completely addicted to reading (especially personal) weblogs. At the moment, there are almost 60 that I track, but I’m always open to suggestions. Lemme know in the comments if there are any that I should subscribe to.

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Non-technical or non-interested people:

1. Good for you!
2. I’m posting this so that others with similar problems have more joy with google than I did.

Two days ago I made the mistake of even wanting to downgrade my laptop’s (HP NC8430) Windows XP SP2 video drivers from ATI Catalyst 7.10 to the latest HP-blessed version (8.391.3-070626a-050362C). My reason for wanting to downgrade was that all the ATI drivers suck (on all operating systems), but downgrading to the HP version at least gets me HP support, which I still have on this corporate grade laptop.

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This is my links page, mostly reserved for static things I think are interesting.  For dynamic stuff (such as blogs), check the right sidebar for my Google Reader exported items.

• De Wijn Recensent – my best friend (I have more than one. They are a small but very powerful group of shadowy individuals) is the only Dutch wine reviewer that you can trust. You have to subscribe to his weekly reviews on the site!
• Selecxyz – good friends of mine can link you up with a perfect little villa for your holiday in Italy.

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You know that it’s a great conference when time flies like this. Today (Thursday, November 1) is the fifth and final day, but I would really have liked more.

The morning is mostly occupied with end-of-conference formalities, such as the official announcement of next year’s conference in Columbus, Ohio, now dubbed “VisWeek” and the best paper awards. As mentioned previously, VisTrails won best paper. Another one of my favourites (also from one of my favourite groups, hi there VRVis in Vienna!) won the best application paper award: High-Quality Multimodal Volume Rendering for Preoperative Planning of Neurosurgical Interventions by Johanna Beyer, Markus Hadwiger, Stefan Wolfsberger and Katja Bühler.

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On Day 3 (Tuesday) the actual Visualization conference kicked off with awards and a keynote by Rick Stevens of the Argonne National Laboratory and the University of Chicago. Prof. Jarke van Wijk won the Visualization Technical Achievement award and gave the coolest acceptance speech I have ever had the privilege of experiencing. Spending quite some time on the origins of his (to our Anglophile colleagues) extraordinary name and succeeding in making all of the almost 800 attendees laugh several times, he managed to bring all of this back to the flow visualization research for which he earned this award, and then put it all in context by explaining what his daughter thought of his world-famous inventions: “That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard”. :)

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What an imaginative title!

Today (actually yesterday, but I’m acting as if I wrote this up yesterday, when yesterday was still today, okay?) I had the typical IEEE Vis problem of Too Many Very Cool Things All at the Same Time(TM). I chose to start with the Illustrative Visualization tutorial. One of the highlights of this was Stefan Bruckner’s presentation of his Style Transfer Functions. Stefan is a brilliant presenter, and this deceptively simple idea makes it possible to render, in real-time, illustrative volume renderings with all kinds of cool lighting possibilities. See the figure below:

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Hi there gang!

I’m spending the week in the Hyatt Regency Sacramento (that’s in California, US and A!) at the IEEE Visualization 2007 conference. I’ll try and write more posts if anything with significant bloggability comes up. Until Monday, there are mostly tutorials and the InfoVis conference and on Tuesday Vis itself starts. The difference between InfoVis and (Sci)Vis is a hotly contested topic about which I’m not even going to try to comment here. However, this is a brilliant topic to discuss in bars with visualisation people, as is the difference between visualisation and visualization.

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I’m peppering this with enough keywords so that other idiots will be able to find this easily. MXit is a mobile-phone based chat system that’s very popular in South Africa (Rugby World Cup champions 2007, thank you very much; want to wine about Cueto’s “try”, then first click here). It is possible to run the MXit Java midlet on a J2ME emulator (am I saying this right?) such as mpowerplayer or microemulator. Of course this works on Windows, even the average 12 year-old MXit user can successfully follow the many guides available online and then brag about his technical prowess online to his “friends”.

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Somehow I missed this when searching for something like it the previous time, but Parallel Python (now found via Bruce Eckel’s blog) is exactly what I’ve been looking for.  A simple process pool that can run on multiple cores or on a cluster of machines!

DeVIDE has recently acquired the ability to run in black-box (gui-less) mode, so that networks can also be executed via some other coordination framework, such as Nimrod (see our paper on this, mail me if you want the fulltext).  However, seeing that I’ve neatly abstracted out the interface part of DeVIDE (you can choose between wxPython, simple xml-rpc, command-line with Python driver script, even PyRo), integrating ParallelPython would be a cinch.

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This official GMail blog post announces that the GMail storage counter will be increased even faster… let’s have a look at my gmail.com account:

You are currently using 1541 MB (52%) of your 2911 MB.

What I find even more exciting, is that Google is going to give the free GMail for Domains accounts, which until now were limited to 2GB, the same space counter as normal gmail.com accounts.  As some of you might know, I’ve been rerouting all my work mail (mostly tudelft.nl) to my medvis.org GMail for Domains account.  I have yet to come across a MUA that suits me better than GMail.  Let’s have a look:

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