Eeepe! I did forget that I had a blog... Also, it seems the blogspot server had some severe trouble, which would mean that my blog wasn't accessible. What the heck, this blog has only one reader, and that's me!

I've been spending some time on blender (this is VERY well-done) and specifically with its IKA functionality.

I attended another shoulder replacement: this time a full replacement lasting a good 5 to 5.5 hours performed by the same skilled surgeon as the previous time. Very educational, with a relocation of the teres major and latissimus dorsi thrown in for good measure.

I have also decided to take a more relaxed approach by returning to level-set and fast-marching methods and dscas1 development: I've been spending lots of time on and getting all stressed up about some crackpot neural system ideas that I had. Thus, no Nobel prize this year.

BTW, that kernel patch is now in the ac kernels and should filter through to the main kernel tree at some stage.

Note to world: w3m still rules. I can use it to update via blogger.com (not even opera can do that) and when I edit my blog, w3m automatically opens my favourite text editor (jed, doh) to do this with.

After quite a bit of work, I've fixed a bug in linux kernel 2.4.4 on the VT82C686A south bridge. The patch is submitted to the mailing list, so now hold thumbs that it appears in 2.4.5 (or something).

The GeForce2 eats textures and texture interpolation for breakfast. Large ones. I've rewritten the dscas1 rendering architecture to make more use of the GPU... it should still work on lesser texture-hardware, but oh my, it's beautiful on the GeForce. Memory usage for large CT volumes has been cut with 75% due to the new design.

w3m rules! The sweetest little text-mode browser. See slashdot and the ecfh homepage as rendered by w3m in an xterm with anti-aliased font support.

I attended a hemi shoulder replacement today. The procedure was performed by a very good surgeon, so it was a treat to watch. All of this has given me plenty of new ideas to start playing with.

Today, I cleaned my monitor at home. With Dreft(tm).

I want an Agenda VR3. Whatever happens, I hope these people are very successful, they've gone and done a very brave and clever thing. :)

Today, I cleaned my monitor. With Glassex(tm). Paul did too. We have clean monitors.

One day, we'll have a usable browser. Opera is fine, but the new b7 release for linux crashes a tad too often. It seems after all that mozilla, in spite of being HUGE, is the best we have. Actually, with the price of RAM at the moment, it's not that bad a browser choice.

This weekend was a social occasion of note (yes, geeks have these too). PhotoPoint, where I used to keep all my photos, has decided to start charging for their services. It's a really good service, but in this case I scripted something in python and sh which serves my purposes quite well. This also happened during the weekend (only geeks may do this type of thing during social occasions of note).

One plugin later, and real-time volume rendering of CT-data is working. I told you your hair'd stand on end!

Wheeeeeeee! The plugin system now has double the hair-raising ability. It does all kinds of cute things with plugin dependencies and object pools.

Tomorrow (and Saturday) we're having demos. That means no work will get done, especially since my workstation is going to be part of the frikking demonstration.

In spite of all the administrative and political chores which had to be taken care of, RealWork(tm) won by a great margin. I have formalised my Python/VTK plugin system and can now do things with Python/VTK/C++ interaction which will make your hair stand on end and make me very happy.

This weekend will be dedicated to relaxation, which logically does not exclude liberal amounts of CasualCoding(tm).

I've been busy, very busy. You can download an anti-aliasing patch for XJed by clicking here and you can get an idea of what XJed looks like with anti-aliased font-rendering here.

Otherwise, the meetings just never stop. Fortunately they are interspersed with very interesting colloquia. Still, the net result of all this meeting and listening is that RealWork(tm) has to wait...

My camera now has 8 (2 sets) of NiMH batteries. It is now a happy camera.

I went to visit LKEB today. These guys are doing some seriously cool stuff...

We (office-mate and I) had some demonstrations here at informatics for some of the project leaders. They did look impressed.

I also built some potato versions of my latest unstable jed packages. The reports for vtkFlRenderWindowInteractor are coming in, and it seems that it works perfectly on that other toy operating system.

Whoooooooo! My camera just arrived (quick huh?). I'm happy with that.

Yesterday a whole bunch of us went to KU Leuven and to Materialise in Belgium for an academic visit. It was absolutely worth it... these people are doing some really wonderful things with rapid prototyping (3d printing for the luddites amongst my fans).

The DC3400 won the competition, primarily because of its good linux support and the fact that it has a USB port for communication with a host PC. The Oly only has serial and I couldn't find out for sure whether there was linux support. It does have a very good lens, but the Kodak is considerably cheaper and matches the Olympus very well featurewise. I went ahead and ordered directly from Kodak; if everything goes according to plan, I should have the camera by Tuesday. Yaaaaaaay!

I almost bought an Olympus C990Z (US: D490Z) yesterday, but the stupid shop didn't have any in stock and I didn't feel like haggling about the display model. This seems like a very solid 2MP camera and if reviews can be believed, its only con is that it doesn't have USB. At the moment it's between this and the KODAK DC3400, which also seems like a good buy and is even a bit cheaper than the Olympus.

Come and get it, fresh from the oven! The vtk-fltk thing is at v0.2, muchos thingies fixed and improved. It's weekend. Overall the week has been quite productive, but it's still frightening that it's over. This weekend we're planning some serious shopping...

VTK is building on the Octane; as soon as it's done, I can test vtkFlRenderWindowInteractor on it. It seems there might be problems on Solaris as well, but that I can unfortunately not test (yet). And then there's still the little issue of testing it on windows. Yuck.

I've branched off from FlvtkInteractorWindow (but it keeps my fixes) and started vtkFlRenderWindowInteractor. I have done this so that my ideals of keeping things as simple as possible can be realised without hindrance. Click here for more information.

I rule. Actually mpatrol rules. All your bugs are belong to us! dscas1 is now seemingly rock-solid. In addition, I've upgraded to 2.4.2-ac20 and nvidia drivers 0.9.767... these seem fine, and I've now enabled AGP again. On this SMP work machine, 0.9.6 refused to work stably on a 2.4.x kernel with AGP enabled.

Thanks to the mpatrol memory allocation checker (and specifically its --dynamic mode) the bug has had its little head squashed. It turns out that it was hiding in a very old vtk class that I'd written *mumble mumble*.

These past two days have NOT been nice (due to this very elusive bug) but on the bright side, FlvtkInteractorWindow is now cleaner than ever before (all remotely potential problem areas were fixed) and this will shortly be available from my website.

AAAAARRRRRRGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHH I've been chasing the same irritating bug (in one form or the other) for the past 2 days and I'm getting really tired. If tomorrow is a normal working day (please please please) I might get it squashed and then get my life back to normal. Bugs have a strange effect on me.

Yesterday was a bad day for public transport. Down day! Sit! I spent 3 hours on trains and buses for a presentation of around 1.5 hours... at least the presentation (on fMRI) was really good.

I'm currently still spending some time on dscas1: mostly some cleanups and refinements so that I can hand it over to the FE boys to start playing with. Note to world: volumetric data is difficult to work with, purely because of the raw amound of data that one has to shuffle around.

We went to Cascades Japanese restaurant in the Hague last night. The food was absolutely divine and we'll definitely go there again in the future.

dscas1 (my pet cas platform) is getting along very nicely. I had to divert my attention temporarily from the python plugin system in order to finish some work on dscas1 that's been scheduled for Tuesday. Watch this space for screenshots.

Yesssss!!! It works! With the help of David Gobbi, I have a proof of concept of python vtk pipelines integrating seamlessly with c++ vtk pipelines. Interpreted run-time modifiable plugins, here we come!

Now I know stuff about MR angiography and physiological MR spectroscopy and imaging too! After all of this, I'm quite a fan of MRI in general; it's a really amazing technology.

"All your base are belong to us" seems to have become the motto of this generation. For some entertaining background, click here.

Today was a good day (not that it's completely over yet). I managed to finish most of the pipeline<->parameter linkage. Concurrently, I'm trying to see what possibilties there are w.r.t. integrating python vtk pipelines with existing C++ pipelines. If this can happen in a elegant way, this visualisation platform is going to rule!

Urk, I can't seem to decide which digital camera to get... there are so many available now and each one of them has something different to offer. This is probably going to take longer than I thought.

Tomorrow I work at home, so I'll be able to get some serious RealWork(tm) done. This is a good thing, seeing that I have to be an Utrecht again on Friday.

Whee, in spite of suffering from severe time for RealWork(tm) today, I managed to squash two of the nastiest remaining bugs in David Pont's fltk->vtk mixture. Hopefully we'll be able to make this available to the rest of the community.

BIG WHOOHOO, our 2-strong household just got one super-career richer today!!

A little bit of this and a little bit of that... have a look at this website. It's the virtual home and diary of a friend of mine who's spending 15 months of his life on the Antarctic. The diary is mostly a fun read and has pretty pictures too!

The MRI course was very good. Given some glue and a few bits of wood I should be able to build an MRI scanner of my own now. :) Today I also realised that this week and the next are going to be VERY busy... this means some careful juggling in order to keep everybody happy.

Yummy Sunday. One whole day of sitting around and playing with stuff. It seems my brain was working behind my back, because the one really convoluted paper I had to review suddenly became very understandable, in spite of the authors' insistence on making everything as difficult as mathematically possible.

My pet project is slowly taking shape. Fortunately, with all that open source around, it's going much faster than it would've otherwise. Obviously, if I even half-finish it, it'll be open source too. Maybe one or two crazy people will find it useful.

Meeup, tomorrow I get to go to Utrecht again, this time to have all the secrets of MRI revealed by probably Mr MRI himself.

The Hague can get VERY busy on a Saturday... it was fun walking around there though. We did get everything we needed, and I even got to look at some digital cameras, although none of the ones that I'm actually interested in.

At the moment I'm busy rebuilding the xfree86 4.0.2 -7 debs for potato. These should work on the firewall machine, so then there's an extra graphical terminal.

Wheeee! I've had a great idea for a (teensy weensy little) pet project. This might start taking shape very soon. Suffice to say, it's a useful (to a geek) thing and it's quite unique. *think think*

I'm going to town today in order to pick up an extra keyboard and mouse to go with the new Whiskey-Monitor. It's a really beautiful day for being outside...

Yaaay... yet another jed upload done. rgrep has been changed to jgrep so as not to conflict with rgrep in package grep.

Today I swapped a bottle of whiskey for a friend's monitor... actually, he gave me the monitor and the bottle was just my way of saying thanks. It's a really cool little 14" which I can now connect to my firewall machine... it's hard to believe that this firewall machine used to be my "main" machine just a short while ago. It is still a Celeron 450 (one of those OC'd 300s, Mendocino core, i.e. 128K L2 on-die) with a Matrox G400 32MB...

Two rather hardcore papers to review for submission to a not-so-local conference (my understatement of the day). I seem to be getting quite good at this, although these are probably going to take muuuuch longer than lunchtime. BTW, my inbox is empty for the first time in months. This makes me an incredibly happy and balanced person.

The conflict has been resolved and the new packages have been uploaded. Chalk one up for the programmer of the wild frontier!

The bugs have been fixed (although the one fix could cause a conflict with one of the other packages, this is being looked into), my inbox is back down to 1 (one) mail, yaaaaaaaay, and my new 2.4.2-ac7 is compiling as I speak; let's see if it does anything w.r.t. stability (the sysrq thingy should also help if I have some more weird behaviour).

Last night was great fun. Also, I received the mail I was waiting for which meant that I spent the day in Utrecht and that I will be going there regularly for the next two weeks. Most of the day was spent hearing all there is to hear about ultrasound medical imaging.

I got home at about 16:45 and after a bit of relaxing started eating at my bloated inbox (it had only one mail in it just yesterday). Lots of admin, including one or two new bug reports on my debian packages. These will be fixed tonight. My main machine also does weird (semi-unstable) things of late... I suspect something is awry with the power-saving.

The paper review is done (admittedly it took a bit longer than lunch), I had a long discussion with my advisor (always interesting) and then there was the practicum... today assisting was actually fun. The students come up with all kinds of pretty renderings sometimes.

I am still trying to get hold of the powers that be in Utrecht to be able to take part in their course on the physics of medical imaging. People are either ill or on their way to far-off places.

Hmmm, as we have some social goings-on tonight, it doesn't seem like I'll get any "real" work done after all.

Erk, it seems a deadline has crept up on me. This deadline is today... I have to review a paper for submission to a local conference. I'll have this done before lunch (the work is more or less in one of my (older) areas of expertise) as I have to assist with a practicum this afternoon. Maybe laaaater today I can get some real work done. :)

Meep! I have it setup so that a cgi on my website (cpbotha.net) sucks my weblog from blogspot.com when it gets accessed.

The time zone is now set correctly. This means that I will no longer seem like the vampire weblogger.

Yaaaay, my first weblog entry. Today I spent most of my time researching fast-marching methods (which I now more or less fully grasp) and level-set methods (which are related to fast-marching methods, but somewhat more involved, and thus these are taking me a bit longer to assimilate). Eventually, I'll be juggling around a few hyper-surfaces to see how these methods fare on some of my more hairy data.