Weekly Status Update #13: Abbreviation Bonanza

It’s the Weekly Status Update – Early Saturday morning special, courtesy of my recently acquired inability to sleep in. Slow news week, but this week featuring:  5iler, ESSO34, CMOS, DFQ and D3. I’m sorry the update items are so incredibly disconnected this week and I can’t find a way to make it coherent or bridge the items, but it is what it is:

• I recently read about 5iler somewhere. It is a beautiful webapp for simple note taking in five colorful categories that you can choose yourself. I love it so much, but since I am pretty much set with Evernote for my notes, I am ashamed to say, I haven’t found a use for it for me personally.  Sad times!
• We submitted a video on the pelvic model we are building, the Virtual Surgical Pelvis, and my software to the ESSO conference and got accepted for the video session. It’s really cool that surgeons will get to see our work and I am looking forward to feedback from the medical community. So on the 29th of October at 16:43, come check out ‘The virtual surgical pelvis: A highly-detailed 3D pelvic model for anatomical education and surgical simulation’ if you are in the neighborhood 😉
• Our home pc decided not to boot anymore this week. News like this affects me in two ways. First, I get excited about an opportunity to diagnose hardware issues and fix them by opening up the pc. Secondly, I get saddened by the potential costs of this depending on which piece of hardware is failing. Since the pc wasn’t doing anything at all anymore, my hardware failure suspects included the CMOS battery, the power supply or the motherboard. After opening up and closing the pc several times to try some things, I decided to try the least cost approach and buy a new CMOS battery. Luckily, this was exactly what was wrong and I was happy to fix the pc and not to spend too much on it :). Fun times emerged later, when we couldn’t use SSL on the freshly booted pc. Apparently, when the date and time of your pc is very wrong, it does not work.  Who knew?
• I got a really sweet compliment this week at work, I was told I look like a dark fantasy queen. Awesome!
• For my current research, I’m playing around with graph layouts in VTK at the C++ level. Since it is quite cumbersome to test it this way (because I’m a C++ noob), I am now prototyping the layout in D3. The downside is, that I first need to learn D3 and javascript and refresh my 90’s HTML skills ;), but wow, D3 is awesome! If you’re interested, check out the examples on their main page or this cool presentation on force-directed graph layouts.  The really cool part of this presentation is that you can play around with his examples, in his slides! The future is now, people!

That’s all for this week, enjoy your weekend and LLAP \V/!