Walking Around Amsterdam

Last Friday, we had a visit from Chris Want (old time Canadian Blender compatriote) and his girlfriend, so that gave me the opportunity to snap some pictures in other part of the city. It was, of course, very nice meeting them and they allowed me to tag along on Saturday for a visit to the Van Gogh museum.

Some people enjoying a cruise on the canal.

NOO! They are everywhere!

After the restaurant, we passed through Central Plaza (or whatever it's called). A Building, the Plaza itself, another building.
I had more pictures, but sadly too blurry.

On Saturday, we payed a visit to the Van Gogh museum. Sadly, no pictures allowed at all inside, so we'll have to make due with those two shots from the park behind the museum itself. This one is another museum of something or another and that one is a concert hall (currently presenting Chopin recitals).

That's it for now. I'll be back next Monday in the cold northern Canada (except not that cold since it's summer), so I don't really expect to be posting more stuff here.

Next time I'm halfway across the globe I guess.

More Pictures

Shipping Peach DVDs on Tuesday

Inside the Blender Institute: the artists room, the walls are full of these, the kitchen/dinning room, the developers' corner.

Taken from the balcony in the back of the apartment: Picture 1, Picture 2, Picture 3.

That's it for now.

Martin

Snapshots from Amsterdam

Hi,

I'm in Amsterdam for three weeks, working at the Blender Institute, so I'll use the opportunity to revive this blog a bit.

Today was a bright, warm and sunny day, so I took some shots on the walk from the apartment to the institute.

Sidewalk view
Across a canal
Bus
Street view
Canal shots again, one more, another
Courtyard
Tram
Boat on the canal (a tourist tour I think)
Artis Zoo (just across the canal from Entrepotdok)
Interesting bridge
Probably art or something
An old docking crane
Entrepotdok

Pictures from the inside of the apartment: my room, dining room and living room, stairs leading to the entrance (we don't see much, but there's a weird curve at the bottom, the stairs are angling toward the wall and not toward the door).

I'll post some more as soon as I have them.

Martin

Joke

Ok, it's been a while, just thought I'd drop in a little joke before I forget it.


Why the chicken crossed the Möbius strip?
To get to the other... oh...


Yes, the geek factor is really high, and as such, I found it highly amusing.

That's life.

Homebrew scripts

Hi there, long time no blog.

This is a short post to introduce two home made scripts. They're not terribly useful, but I do happen to use them often and I've been asked in the past to share them, so I thought I might as well do it here (assuming people still read this blog...).

Anyhow, both are python scripts, but only the first one is truely cross platform, though the second one could be changed to be so too.

numericnames

This script renames files in folders and subfolders (recursively) to follow a numeric naming scheme. That is, all files in a folder will be renamed to FOLDERNAME00000.extension, where FOLDERNAME is the name of the folder in question, 00000 is a numeric sequence and extension is the extension of the file. The numeric sequence is basicly a padded count of the files in the folder. If you have 10 files, the sequence will be 01, 02, 03, ... The script takes into account deleted files (filling the empty slots when renaming) and increases the padding size when needed. I mostly use this script on images folder, usually photos or the like when I don't really care about the name of the file but still want to give them a meaningful base name (the name of the folder).

wallpaper

This script is basicly a wallpaper management tool. It requires KDE and pyKDE's DCOP access to change the wallpaper, but it could be changed to use some Gnome method, win32 method or whatnot.
It takes a source directory (with possible subdirectories), supports different operations: changing the wallpaper randomly, changing and deleting the current wallpaper, changing to (or one of) the latest wallpaper(s), running a renaming script (I use numericnames for that). You can specify a pattern to use only a subdirectory of the source folder. The script uses a simple config file (which it locates next to its own location) to define source directory and default operation. The config file is generated on first run.

Hopefully, those could be useful to someone else too.

Martin

Blender Conference

Wheee! Long time no blog.

As some might know, I'm in Amsterdam this week end, attending the annual Blender Conference.

I'll put more impressions/feedback on that later, this is just a quick post with the first photos.

Central Place at Schipol airport

Waiting for the train to Central Station

Angela introducing WAVK

After the first day, discussion moved on to more serious matters. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

Saturday "morning" looking out of De Waag

That's about it for now, 'till next time...

Martin

Python Strike Back

G'day!

I've been taking a short break from complex decimator code today and fiddling with some more fun stuff.

Py Buttons!

Basicly, it evaluates the text as a python expression as if using eval() and puts the value back in the button as usual (meaning it checks for limits and all that). The execution is done sandboxed, it only has access to __builtin__ as well as the Blender and math modules (if it can import them).

Branching to the python evaluation code is based on the presence of the hash (#) symbol as first character. I thought it would be ironic to use the Python comment sign to signal Python evaluation. The irony is nice for memory :P. This is very faculative though, it could very well evaluate everything if it is wanted.

Right now (meaning after capturing the video), it pops the normal Python error message if it hits and error and prints the traceback in the console. It could be done silently though (as shown in the video).

Python Powa!

Martin