There are three issues I’d like to cover in today’s lecture.

Firstly, cheap headphones:

I needed a cheap set of new headphones for listening to music at work, so I made the huge mistake of buying Sennheiser PX20. My office mates can hear my music better than I can when I use these, that’s just how bad they leak. Advice: do not buy these. If a friend gives them to you as a present, terminate the friendship. (To make really sure that others searching for reviews on these headphones do find something and to make my message even clearer: Sennheiser PX-20, or PX20, headphones suck. Completely.)

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Sweden will attempt to wean itself off oil completely, instead fulfilling all its energy requirements with renewable resources.

See this Guardian article for more details.

Let’s hope that the rest of Europe follows in short order.

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The EETimes is reporting that the TU Delft is amongst the top 10 universities world-wide involved in the business of training electrical engineers. Kickass!

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Start here.

Unfortunately, it seems you do need IE (Firefox won’t do) on Windows to view this video. I guess that’s an interesting hint of IronPython’s ideological problems as well.

That being said, the demo is pretty cool. The seamless sharing of .NET objects between for example C# and Python is impressive.

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Whoop, I finally found this old favourite HOWTO of mine again! I’ll re-read it to make sure I still know how it goes and then get immediately back to coding.

Enlighten yourself by clicking here. I think this is the original source, but I don’t like the new split version all that much.

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I’ve constructed a Python example that shows how one can minimally-invasively change the behaviour of all classes in a module. The example illustrates how to add an ErrorEvent handler automatically to all Python VTK classes at run-time.

See the VTK-users mailing list thread here

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I’m trying to decide between these two nominees for the award of “Losers of the Century” (play dramatic Oscar theme here): On the one hand we have Mensa, a society for people with IQs in the top 2% of the population (*getting nauseous*) and on the other hand we have the International High IQ Society, in this case for people in the top 5% of the population. This society claims to foster “intellectual thinking”. Snigger.

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Whooohoooo! We’re1 here at the IEEE Visualization 2005 conference in the Minneapolis Hilton.

It being Sunday, we’re nursing our 7-hour jet lag and relaxing with a light tutorial, General Purpose Computing on GPUs. The team presenting this tutorial are some of the heavy-weights in the field and so far it’s quite interesting.

During the next few days, I’ll try and post an update or two. Rubbing shoulders with the Visualisation world’s Who’s Who obviously takes precedence over abusing the conference WLAN to blog like a nerd.

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I don’t have the time to explain to you how much SORBS sucks and how I wish that their servers and their whole organisation would just disappear from the face of the internet, so I’ll point you at some other reports:

• Why SORBS Sucks
• SORBS Sucks
• Why I agree that SORBS sucks!
• Google results for “sorbs sucks”

One of the GMail MTAs (qmail.gmail.com) has been listed in the SORBS database (due to one jackass sending a mail to a SORBS spamtrap address) and now I haven’t been able to send mail to a number of my friends and family. Many GMail users will be terribly inconvenienced by this. If I want to have the IP delisted, I’m supposed to pay SORBS $50. That’s extortion!

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I’ve lost at least 5 hours of my life to the frikking euro key on my Microsoft Natural (old-style) keyboard. It seems that Gnome 2.10 on Ubuntu 5.04, otherwise a great combination, enjoys torturing its Dvorak keyboard layout users with the euro-symbol on the “5” key. It simply doesn’t work, no matter what you try.

After sacrificing the prerequisite 5 hours to the Linux gods of Ultimate Non-Usability, I came up with the following solution. Make the following change to your /etc/X11/xkb/symbols/pc/dvorak file:

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