I’ve just activated CloudFlare (the free tier) for vxlabs.com, hoping to do even faster page loads. Most of my WordPress installations already use WP Super Cache to serve mostly static pages when you come here, but CloudFlare should speed this up even further via their content and network traffic optimization, and their servers dotted all over the globe. Configuration was quite painless (you have to configure your domain’s DNS to point to CloudFlare’s servers, then a few settings using their web interface).

(TL;DR See the last paragraph for how to get the Dell U2713HM working on the HDMI output of the Acer V3-571G at 2560×1440 @ 50Hz.) The Dell Ultrasharp U2713HM is a 27″ IPS panel with a resolution of 2560×1440. I recently acquired this monitor and wanted to connect it to my Linux-only Acer V3-571G i7 laptop, which only a VGA (D-SUB; max resolution 2048×1536) and an HDMI 1.4 output. The monitor has been optimised to show the Dell logo.

Today, Qt 5.3.1 was released along with Qt Creator 3.1.2. Unfortunately, nsf’s EmacsKeys plugin, merged into the Qt trunk a few months ago, was not a part of this release (it should be included in Qt Creator 3.2). Because the Emacs keybindings are hardwired into my fingers, and I’m using QtCreator for a project at the moment, I spent some time figuring out how to get the plugin built for Qt Creator 3.

Post summary: The level set method is a powerful alternative way to represent N-dimensional surfaces evolving through space. (This is a significantly extended blog-post version of three slides from my Medical Visualization lecture on image analysis.) Imagine that you would like to represent a contour in 2D or a surface in 3D, for example to delineate objects in a 2D image or in a 3D volumetric dataset. Now imagine that for some reason you would also like have this contour or surface move through space, for example to inflate it, or to shrink it, at the same time dynamically morphing the surface to better fit around the object of interest.

In the store today, I wanted to check that the Huawei E3331 3G USB dongle I was about to buy would work with my Ubuntu Linux laptops. Because I couldn’t find any posts confirming this, I’m writing this one. Summary: I can confirm that the Huawei E3331 3G USB dongle works, completely out of the box and without any problems, on Ubuntu 14.04. After inserting the card into a USB slot, I was greeted by this notification:

Just in case you run into the same problem I did when upgrading Roundcube from version 0.9.5 to 1.0.1, I’m posting the exact steps I took to fix the Error in DDL upgrade problem. So, you’ve followed the Roundcube upgrade instructions, either using the installto.sh or the update.sh script, and then this happens: Updating database schema (2013042700)... [OK] Updating database schema (2013052500)... [FAILED] ERROR: Error in DDL upgrade 2013052500: [1142] CREATE command denied to user 'roundcube'@'localhost' for table 'cache_shared'All done.

mu4e is a mail user agent for your Emacs. After leaving GMail a few months ago, this is the first MUA that I am loving even more. The major reasons for this are the faster than GMail real-time search (e.g. press s, then from:buddy flag:attach design review and watch it search my 68 thousand email archive in a fraction of a second), its Emacs foundation (the more I use it, the better I get at customizing it) and the observation that having my email in an uncluttered, by default text-only interface, somehow helps me to maintain the feeling of control.