Some prick has been sending out tons and tons of spam with my ieee.org email address spoofed as the from address. This means I have been getting tons and tons of “delivery failed” mails, as obviousy many of the addresses in the moron’s database are not valid. I know that he/she has been spamming from a tiscali.it ADSL PPP address via a tiscali.it mail server, but mails to abuse@tiscali.it have had absolutely no effect.
Windows programming is nasty
I’ve spent two days trying to figure out how to send an ATA command directly to an IDE hard drive from Windows. I’ve finally succeeded, but with an undocumented and unsupported IOCTL call. It turns out that’s the ONLY way to do what I want, at least until Windows XP SP2 is released when the documented and supported version of a similar IOCTL will be made available. That’s nasty. By the way, C’T (an extremely technical German computer magazine, fortunately now with a Dutch edition as well) rules in more ways than one.
A slightly improved perspective BTF ordering
Finding a single BTF (back-to-front) ordering for perspectively rendered volumes without sorting is more difficult than it sounds. See what happens when we make use of a traditional BTF (Frieder et al., 1985): it breaks badly. Ed Swan came up with a super-elegant constructive proof for a perspective BTF ordering that works (Swan, 1998). However, his “PBTF” rendering and its proof assume that voxels are infinitesimally small. As is very often the case, voxels can have significant size, and volume resolution is often lower than screen resolution, which results in disturbing rendering artefacts.
The Visualisation and Image Processing Platform Formerly Known as DSCAS3
The current marketing conditions and long-term strategy dictate a name change. The new name should contain at least the words “Delft”, “Visualisation”, “Image [Processing]”, and then one of “platform”, “framework”, “[software environment]”. I’m currently looking at “devise” (Delft Visualisation and Image processing Software Environment), “devious” (“ou” not used, the rest you can easily guess) and perhaps “divine” (or “devine”, which I like more, because of the infamous Devine Brown and the fact that I would be able to use acronyms like “PIMP” for Parallel IMage Processing”) which would stand for Delft Visualisation and Image processing Network Environment, which is not an entirely correct description (the network environment is just one aspect) but acceptable nonetheless.
Andrew October, Cape Town journalist, you are a *CENSORED*
IMPORTANT NOTE: Due to an email from Andrew October, I had to remove some parts of this posting. Please see this for details. Also read the article that caused all of this. Andrew October, Cape Town journalist, is doing his best to destroy Christmas for the children. Urgh!
DSCAS does 2D registration
The code is just short of being awe-inspiringly horrible, but it works and is quite usable for automatic and semi-automatic rigid registration of 2D sections for 3D reconstruction. See the screenshot below:
Mark Shuttleworth NOT the first African in Space, but likes Python
Contrary to popular belief and idiot marketing droids, Mark Shuttleworth is technically not the first African in space. This of course is dependent on your definition of “African”, but if that definition is “person born in Africa”, the title of First African in Space should go to Colonel Patrick Baudry, a French dude who was born in Douala, Cameroon on March 6, 1946. Colonel Baudry was part of the 1985 space shuttle Discovery crew.
Setup CVS Read-Only Access
I bet you’ve always wondered how to setup a CVS repository with read-only access. This is not quite as straightforward as you think. Ha! Read this. Then again, maybe this is not as exciting as one may think.
Toshiba 2.5″ HDD power management
Urgh… the Toshiba MK3018GAS 2.5″ hard drive in my laptop keeps on spinning down every so often in spite of Windows XP being configured only to spin it down after 30 minutes of idle time. This is extremely frustrating. Under linux, hdparm -S with a suitable time-out did the trick just marvellously. After having investigated this issue with several different diagnostic utilities, it turns out the disc has its own power management as well.
Back from ZA 2003
What a lovely holiday… I got time to party with many of the friends, spend quality time with the family, drink many Windhoek Lagers and eat too much red meat. Unfortunately, I missed Goof’s bachelors’ party. Next time! ;) On a totally unrelated note, it seems my Tungsten E is working with Evolution 1.2.4, gnome-pilot DEBs from <http: debian="" www.madhack.com=""> and some spit. The whole volatile combination seems to be dancing drunkily on the edge of a very sharp Minora blade though…