Logging the Switch

Posts

  • Mar 14, 2006

    New Blog

    I opened a new blog today, which sole purpose will be to log the events from now until I’m back from Iceland. The language will be Dutch, since it will also be the communication channel for me to my family and friends while I’m away.

    And as an extra service: A direct link to the RSS feed.

    read more
  • Mar 13, 2006

    Kaizers Orchestra In Effenaar

    Great concert, little short maybe, but well… Making it longer won’t make it long enough :)

    The setlist was something like this (taken from a gig in Danmark, changed where I knew the differences):

    • KGB
    • Delikatessen
    • Knekker deg til sist
    • Hevnervals
    • Container
    • Señor Flamingos Adieu
    • Blitzregn Baby
    • Bøn Fra Helvete
    • Mann Mot Mann
    • Kontroll På Kontinentet
    • Christiania (yes, the self-governed community in Denmark)
    • På Ditt Skift
    • Die Polizei (request from audience)
    • Di Grind
    • Dieter Meyers Institution
    • Evig Pint
    • Ompa til Du dør
    • Maestro

    Reprise:

    • Mr. Kaizer…
    • Bak et Halleluja
    • Resistansen

    Thanks to Lotte, Sjoerd, and Bram for joining me. Ah, and Lowlands is a no go, since I’ll be in Iceland by then after all (I thought Lowlands was in July).

    And I found some English translations to the lyrics!

    read more
  • Mar 5, 2006

    Visualization

    Ooooh, my first visualization application!

    For the course Visualization I write a fluids flow visualization. Based on some sample code and a simulation, this little beast already miaows a bit. We had smoke and hedgehogs, two fairly standard techniques in visualization. It shows you the density and direction of the flow of a fluid (or gas if you like) when you inject some fluid in it (using your mouse in this simulation).

    By the way, the whole thing is animated of course.


    The two standard visualizations

    Now I added streamlines, another technique. Currently it uses Euler’s numerical integration, which is fairly inaccurate for this application. I think I’ll have to change it before I hand it in.


    The newly added visualization

    There is this little problem with streamlines; you don’t know in advance where they will end up. Thus you’ll never know whether you cover an area well enough to be able to say something about it. Maybe there are some clever algorithms that can, but we should probably look into something else.


    Combining all three techniques is pretty, but completely useless!

    Coming up: Isolines. You know, the things you see on the weather map indicating areas with the same air pressure, well here it will be matter density, but the idea remains the same of course. They are much easier to evenly distribute them over the whole image, but are a bit harder to construct.

    Update: People wanted to play with it already, so I made a fluids-0.0.0 release.

    read more
  • Mar 2, 2006

    Finally: Almost full Switch to Linux

    Finally, after having Hoefnix for more than a year, I’m booting Linux on my Mac more and more often. There were a few reasons I sticked to OS X, one of them was I didn’t really had a reason to over to Linux; everything worked for me… Well, sort of, I’m getting fed up with looking for warez and shit while there is an enormous repository of Free Software in the world just waiting to be discovered and used.

    The course of Visualization led me back to Linux, since the libraries that I needed aren’t available in DarwinPorts at the time and they are in Debian, which is just so much easier. Gotta love a good package management system :-)

    So now I’m dualbooting again, like in the old days with Windows and Linux. Basically for all the imaging stuff I use OS X. Ah, and for Democracy TV of course (Linux player still in very early alpha).

    read more
  • Mar 2, 2006

    Carnaval 2006

    Carnaval is well over by now. In the Netherlands, it is fairly common for a city to have a different name, I was in Breda at my parents’, which is called Kielegat during Carnaval.

    Sunday was the big parade in Prinsenbeek or better: Boemeldonck. Prinsenbeek is a village (population 11.000) right next to Breda and it has a large tradition of carnaval. Everyone seems to be in some way connected to the celebrations, via one of the many carnaval clubs, or active in the organization of activities during carnaval.

    read more