The Django REST Framework is awesome, for a whole bunch of reasons, one of them being the browsable HTML version of your API that it automatically generates for you.

As a part of this, it extracts any docstrings that you might have defined for the relevant class (ViewSet or CBV) and adds an HTML version of this documentation to the browsable API, like this:

However, as described in the relevant documentation, it expects Markdown syntax by default. I like Markdown, but the rest of my Python docstrings are all in reStructuredText, which is the default documentation format for many Python projects.

Last night I had to backup 2760 photos and videos, about 6.3G worth, from my Nexus 4 Android phone to my Linux laptop.

The Nexus 4, like many other Android phones, only supports the Media Transfer Protocol, or MTP, for transferring files via USB connection. With Ubuntu 14.04, this is a fortunately a plug and play situation: Connect the phone via USB cable, and start dragging and dropping files to and fro using the built-in file manager on the Linux side.

I’m helping someone process a collection of research data that has been entered by a third party using Excel. We’re using LibreOffice Calc, because research should be reproducible by anyone, not just those in possession of prioprietary software licenses (this also means that we use R, JGR and DeduceR instead of SPSS and Statistica; perhaps more on that later).

After having to fix hundreds of badly entered dates with basic functions (we highly recommend that ISO 8601 format dates, i.e. YYYY-MM-DD, are used from the very start, instead of ambiguous local formats), we ended up with a stubborn subset of DD-MM-YYYY formatted dates in cells that explicitly had ISO 8601 format configured.

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). It somehow missed my mail server’s DNS record when copying everything over, but that was quick to fix. (It also seems that the SSL-protected roundcube I have on another server in this domain now keeps on logging me out after 2 seconds, but I’m not 100% sure that that’s due to CloudFlare.)

(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.

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 3.1.2. This post explains how you too can build it, but, if you’re on Ubuntu 14.04 with Qt 5.3.1 x64, you can just download my binaries and the keymap file (see under requirements).

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.