I’ve unfortunately not been involved in any quantum entanglement accidents recently — teaching duties are mostly to be blamed for my two-week silence. Besides spending at least a whole work-day every week on our Data Visualisation practical, I’ve been lecturing and also been preparing a new lecture block on information visualisation with a dash of visual data analysis. Due to my not secretly being an infovis expert, this latter activity has taken up quite a chunk of my time and effort. On the other hand, the exercise has forced me to acquire a significant amount of new infovis brain juice which I’ll probably soon be applying to impressive effect.
In any case.
On the geek front, I have to say that I’m really liking Windows 7. Partly eye-candy, partly the SuperBar, partly the revamped file manager: I’m a happy camper both on the NetBook (just installed 4GB of SDHC especially for ReadyBoost) and on the quad core workstation. Feel free to discuss this in the comments, even, or especially, my black turtleneck-wearing friends! :) Unrelated to the big 7, it turns out that if you use large removable (USB) drives between computers with different operating systems, NTFS is your best bet. Even more unrelated, I’ve also discovered that one can implement complete independent Windows applications using AutoHotkey. Before I knew what I was doing, I had re-implemented most of my envedit application in AutoHotKey, with GUI and all (you can find my efforts in SVN, AHK’s a strange little language). The resultant stand-alone app is 400k, which compares favourably to the 4MB envedit installation. To conclude this week’s edition of I Really Like Geeking Out, I broke down and bought 20G of extra Google storage for slightly less than EUR 5 per year. I’m not using it (yet), but I somehow get a kick from seeing this at the bottom of my GMail interface (click the image for a slightly larger version):
With regard to research, things have been going just swimmingly. There are a number of really cool articles being lovingly incubated as we speak. Some mathematical visualization and some time-varying VDA will go to Eurovis, whilst one other submission is already being carefully groomed for the Vis deadline in March next year.
In other news that absolutely made my day on Monday, November 9, 2009: After being in the oven for almost two years, our pathological shoulder segmentation article should soon appear at a news-stand near you:
Peter R Krekel, Edward R Valstar, Frits H Post, Piet M Rozing, and Charl P Botha. 2009. Combined Surface and Volume Processing for Fused Joint Segmentation. The International Journal for Computer Assisted Radiology and Surgery.
Mr Cricket, that was just marvelous!
Finally, I’m ecstatic to report that due to an unfair dose of serendipity, not in the least brought about by the involvement of one extremely resourceful individual, Longitudinal Medical Visualisation (google should take you to the right place) looks like it might be getting off the ground in a Really Big Way soon. Stay tuned kids, stay tuned.