Wednesday, April 30, 2014

Gah - Stupid Windows Updates - 7+ Taskbar Tweaker Broken

To the damned bastard(s) who made the changes included in the latest round of Windows updates which ended up breaking 7+ Taskbar Tweaker (by causing it to fail with a "Could not load library (107)" error):


Arrrrrghhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!! Thanks for so thoroughly breaking my workflow... May you spend the next ten years debugging the most hideous heisenbugs known (and not yet known) to man!

Bloody effin' dimwits!

Grrr!

Sunday, April 27, 2014

Autumn Colours - Part 1

Autumn is one of the most colourful times of the year for photography (apart from spring, with all the traditional blossoms and blooming flowerbeds). It's the only time of the year when trees explode into vibrant displays of reds, oranges, yellows, and greens, all the while maintaining a really delicious plump and fluffy look. For once, the trees take on a life of their own, instead of being mere "dull green foliage", especially when an isolated tree in the middle of nowhere puts on a spectacular display of its own, in brilliant yellow/gold or flaming red.





This year though, it was slim pickings, with foul weather (2 weeks of strong winds, a sudden temperature drop, and daily rain in early March, followed by about 3-4 weeks of similar weather but with much more rain in mid-April) blasting away much of the foliage off the trees. Critically, most of the red leaves were removed, along with half of the orange ones, leaving many trees either anemic-looking or without the rich punchy colours that come with having a mix of different coloured leaves up on the branches. Nevertheless, here are some shots from the first half of autumn that I managed to get.

Roosters!

As you may have noticed from the resumption of commit activity related to animation functionality in the past few days, I've finally completed a gruelling 6-7 week crunch period of intensive writing as part of my research work (coinciding with about 3-4 weeks of absolutely miserable weather here, with strong winds, days-on-end of heavy rain, and cold weather). So, I've finally been able to relax a bit for the first time in ages to get off my chair (and outside the house!) as well as catching up on some Blender dev work I've been meaning to do but have had to postpone. As the first "free" weekend I've had for a while, I decided to take the afternoon off and have a walk around. This proved to be quite a fruitful decision...




Arriving at the Ilam Homestead (aka the University's "Staff Club" grounds -- located across the road from our department), I was greeted by the sight of these two clucky folk roaming around.


Sunday, April 13, 2014

Link Dump - Some Fun and Interesting Links

Here is a followup to my other link dump post with a set of fun and interesting links to things I've come across and/or been using for the past few months. Enjoy!


Link Dump - Some common and interesting questions answered

From time to time, some links will come up regarding some interesting questions which you may have always wondered about. Here is a collection of such links I collected a few months back. Enjoy!


Monday, April 7, 2014

Notes on Visualisation and Interfaces for Large Datasets

For anyone interested in visualisation-type stuff of large datasets, here are a few leads (from the literature search I've been doing as part of my research work) to save some time. I actually have some more comprehensive write ups on many of these topics (and also on other topics), but that'll be for another day...

Farewelling old tech - Router + ADSL Modem

On Friday, I finally retired our old ADSL Modem and wireless router...


They've served us well for close to a decade, but the increasing frequency of downtimes and flakiness had been causing issues and a bit of frustration for the last few years. Last week, things finally came to a head: for a few days in a row, the modem would suddenly "die" (i.e. sometimes it'd be left with just the power + status light, but occasionally, it would be just the power light, and always sometime between 8pm and 10pm) - nearly once every 8-12 hours. On Thursday night, it "died" as usual, and never managed to reconnect to the internet again. It just kept searching/attempting to connect, again and again and again... even after being completely unplugged (power, cables, everything - left alone to sit for a few hours like that between attempts) multiple times, and resetted (using the recessed button on the back).