In this week’s post, documenting the 7th week of 2010, I wonder about perceived business, mention two of our most recent open source releases and give to you, my readers, two screencasts about the DRE, in addition probably highly effective in the treatment of insomnia. Screenshot of the FoBVis system. This is just one of our many attempts to take over the world, subtly.
Just before bedtime on Monday, I had still managed to make a note in my special top-secret Weekly Head Voices journal. I usually do this every day to make sure I don’t forget anything by the weekend, when I usually have some time to write these posts. Thursday night’s entry simply says “WTF, where did my week go?!” — There had been no other entries since Monday. I’m still not quite sure why it felt that way, as my breakdown of activities is similar to that of the previous week: 2 hours of lecture preparation, 3 hours of lecturing, 15 hours of scheduled meetings and 20 tasks completed (one more than last week!!) across 10 projects. Perhaps those four extra hours of meetings don’t scale linearly in the amount of business they cause, due to the number of extra context switches that they bring. I have to add that a number of truly exciting projects are brewing, but I can’t say more about them until I can say more about them, if you know what I mean.
We (The Group, of course) recently released two new open source software projects:
- FoBVis is a tool for the real-time acquisition and visualisation of human motion: Currently it supports the Flock-of-Birds electromagnetic acquisition system, we are currently working to integrate Optotrak optical tracking system. We should also shortly have a version of the DRE that can run the FoBVis on YOUR computer as well.
- HistoVis is a client-server system for the visualisation of large collections of (registered) histological sections.
It’s all very exciting that more products of our research are entering the big bad outside world! The FoBVis is already being actively used by the LUMC Laboratory for Motion Analysis (we hope that more labs will start using this soon), and HistoVis will soon go live from the visible-orbit.nl server. Of course these have both been released under the new BSD license, as the GPL sucks.
Screencasts: Video Performance Art of the Nerdily Inclined. That’s where one makes a recording of one’s computer screen whilst demonstrating some or other procedure, optionally narrated by oneself, and then proceeds to upload said recording (called a screencast) to YouTube or similar. See a previous post of mine for one possible (and free) way of doing this on Windows. This weekend I produced and uploaded two such pieces, both demonstrating aspects of the DeVIDE Runtime Environment, or DRE, that paradoxically do NOT involve DeVIDE itself. Especially the second is really soothing, one could even say mildly sleep-inducing. I just say: (1) Try (2) it.
To conclude, I give you a track from the new Massive Attack album Heligoland, called Paradise Circus. It should make your brain sit and scratch its chin stubble, not unlike the usual dose of backyard philosophy: