What's it all about, Alfie?

On my way in this morning, I was thinking again about scientific visualization, and in particular, VRML. It's an interesting technology that I never got to do a lot of experimentation on at the time of my thesis, but since then, I've thought it would have been a wonderful way to visualize the results of the simulations. Given that I hadn't updated my VRML viewer on OS X in a while, I decided to see if FreeWRL had been updated recently.

Luckily, it had - to 1.21.0.

Interestingly, there now seems to be a vrml.jar that's part of the package, but I can't find a thing on it on the FreeWRL site. Maybe it's something that's in the beginning stages, but what a hoot to have it embed-able in a Java application. Interesting possibilities.

The tests work great on my aging MacBook Pro. Very nice indeed.

UPDATE: I found that there are a few tools for Blender to allow you to import and export VRML 2.0 files. This would be nice if I were creating them by hand, and it's nice to know about. I just need the talent now 🙂

This morning, I saw that Perian 1.1.2 was released fixing the problem that the updater never actually ran, thus making it impossible to use the built-in update mechanism. Additionally, some of the video stream codecs were dropping some frames. I hadn't noticed the latter, but I had certainly noticed the former. I was thinking Why is this taking so long?

Well, there's my answer. It wasn't ever going to complete. So I'm glad I went and grabbed a copy myself. Nice to have if you have media you have to deal with.

This morning I saw that Cyberduck 3.0.3 is out - fixing a few "arbitrary crashes" and fixing the handling of the Web URLs. I'm not exactly sure what arbitrary crashes is all about, but I'm guessing that it's something that was hard to track down, they put a big hammer to it, not wanting to really dig in and find the problem, and this 'big hammer' solved the issue. Like making large blocks synchronous - it doesn't really find and solve the problem of multi-threading contention, it just removes it, and in removing it, the problem goes away.

But it's just a guess. Still, it's a nice app.

I try to have a decent attitude about the day, but from the first moments of today, all I've wanted to do was to go back to bed and forget about work. I did my run and got to work - I even got reasonable gas this morning - $3.099/gal... but it's been a struggle just to keep going.

I need to have something to look forward to. Maybe that's a weakness of mine, and a co-worker called it my need to have something to complain about, which may seem true, but I think it's the need for a challenge... a fight. Something to struggle against and overcome. That's what makes a day great.

Today has been a struggle just to keep going. I sure hope that this evening helps to refresh me and make it all seem better. At least something to look forward to.

This morning I saw that OsiriX 3.3 is out and while I don't spend all day looking at the x-rays of the family, it's nice to see what they are doing and staying up do date. This update looks about the same, and I haven't had time to dig into the release notes for this version, but I'm guessing that there are a ton of under-the-covers changes for this guy. It's also fun to check out the x-rays every now and then, and an update means I'll fire up the app and have a look. Fun.

I have been having a lot of issues trying to get a blog editor on Windows and Linux that's decent. In fact, the only editing tool I've been able to use is really the WordPress editor. The others I've tried mess with the date/time stamp and make it impossible to really do what I need. But there's hope - ScribeFire.

I was looking for something about the date/time issues with Deepest Sender, and came across a link for ScribeFire, and decided to give it a try - couldn't hurt. I was very happy I did.

It's not exactly the UI I'd have chosen, but then again, it's not the worst I've seen. It works, and amazingly, it doesn't mess with the posting dates. That's great. Don't get me wrong, it's not MarsEdit, but then again, most of the postings I use Windows and Linux for are work-related, and that's easy stuff.

Anyway... I have a new blogging client and I'm hoping it works every bit as well as I hope.

It's pretty amazing... I think it was the movie Hellraiser where the "bad human" (as opposed to 'Pinhead') said that the ultimate pleasure was the cessation of ultimate pain. I hate to think of having a good day as the absence of having yet another horrible day, but maybe it's just that easy.

I've been able to do a few things today that have nothing to do with the project that would make 'Pinhead' scream and I have to say it feels very good. I've done a lot of work on that 'puzzle box', but even in doing that, I was able to actually make some progress as opposed to being foiled by users not being specific on what they want, or the docs and tools making it virtually impossible to get what they ask for to work.

So it's a 'smiley' day... now if I can just leave before it turns bad again...

At the end of the final debate, the candidates got up and I guess McCain was going to shake Obama's hand, but this was what was caught on TV:

If I were in the McCain Camp, I'd do my best to make this funny -- and try to play it off... otherwise, it looks very very troubling.

The more I look at this, the more troubling it looks. I know how people felt in the Ford Administration when he was always falling. Had to be a horrible feeling.

I found this little tidbit this morning in my RSS feeds... it's saying that the 17-inch MacBook Pro is only slightly delayed due to some problems with the display and optical drive. Fair enough. Looks like it's going to be an interesting January, as the MacWorld conference would be a perfect place to showcase this new release.

I'm still hoping that it's going to come in a quad-core version... but if not, then it'll be a tougher decision on if it's time to buy or not. The all-in-one case would be very nice for me, but the rest of the notebook is pretty much the same as I have. Yeah, a little faster, but not a world faster.

Looks like I've got to wait a few more months to see.

Once again I got a nice little tweet from MarsEdit that it was ready to go with lots of little fixes for version 2.2.1. Many, it seems, are specific to the Atom publishing protocol, and the tweet said that it was happily speeding towards 2.3.

Good enough. Got it, and am using it right now. Super.