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March 30, 2005

It can't be true!

I cannot describe to you the degree to which this illusion is freaking me out. The squares marked “A” and “B” are the same shade of gray!

Checkershadow_illusion4full

Click on the image to go to the MIT site that shows a few more images and some proofs.

 

Stickers

Joho asks, “Why is it that it seems many more Mac owners decorate their laptops with stickers than do PC notebook owners?

For me, it’s because I’m not particularly proud of the brand nor the exterior presentation of my machine. It’s just a box and there are many vendors that will sell me pretty much the same box. As a Windows user, the OS is what I like to customize. I plan on wearing my PC’s down to the rims, too.

 

March 29, 2005

More on GeoURL

Peter Madsen doesn’t quite get GeoURL and frankly neither do I. The link was added mainly for the geek factor as Peter quite accurately surmised.

I saw that on my neighbor page there was a link labeled "RSS". I clicked on it and found that it was my blog's RSS. Hmmm. What I expected was an RSS feed that will syndicate new entries to my neighbor page.

I wrote to the author and said that adding RSS to the neighbor page would be an excellent idea. It's not clear to me how I or anyone will use GeoURL, but RSS is usually the key to unlocking the potential of just about anything.

PS: Hey Pete, here’s a trackback right at ya.

UPDATE: The author replied and said he already supports this! Just add ;format=rss10 or ;format=rss019 to t he end of your neighbor url and viola!

March 28, 2005

Geourl

I added longitude and latitude tags to my <head> meta-data, I pinged GeoURL, and now you can see my site’s neighbors.

Now playing: BBC Radio 4 - Angels

March 27, 2005

Online dice rolling

When we play D&D on Friday nights we need to roll dice. When you’re playing over the Internet it would be nice if everyone could actually see the roll. The solution we came up with a while back was to write a chat program  that had a built-in “roll” command. You could say d20, which means roll a 20–sided die and tell me the result. Or, roll 2d6 which rolls a 6–sided die twice and adds the result.

Writing a chat program is like network programming 101, but I still never got motivated to do it.  So we’ve been using the honor system so far.

Last night I got motivated to be lazy and productive at the same time. I googled for “python chat program” and came up with a Python chat client called Nekkid chat written by Jari Rytilahti. It’s a chat program written in Python (duh) that works with the Naken chat server written by Michael Kohn.

I downloaded and installed the Naken chat server and installed it on my Debian linux server. I use a New Moon dedicated server by Dreamhost. The server is written in straight C and took, oh, about 0.5 seconds to compile and run. It took me longer to review the supplied configuration file than it did to download it and get it running.

Once it was running, I fired up the Nekkid chat client and connected to the server with no problems. I looked at the source code (the beauty of having it written in Python) and saw where I could peek at the client chat input text.

I detected the first word, “roll” and parsed out nds, where n = the number of dice (which can be omitted) and s is the number of sides on the die. I replaced the input text with the result of the evaluation and sent it to the server.

Obviously this is not a “secure” change. A better change would be to detect the command on the server and output text that couldn’t otherwise be faked by a client.

I’ll probably make incremental enhancements from here on out, but it works and that’s probably good enough.

 

 

March 26, 2005

I opened a can of whoop-ass on that pesky laptop...

Remember I told you how my neighbors laptop would more than likely require a re-install of the OS? Well, I beat that b!^(# into submission last night and the machine works fine now. I re-installed Windows XP Service Pack 2 and that must have restored files or settings which got clobbered by spyware. I had to drop into safe mode with command prompt a few times to take matters into my own hands. Microsoft’s AntiSpyware isn’t perfect by any means.

It’s a shame that so many talented programmers out there use the dark side of the force.

I’ll probably get a hot meal brought over to my house soon, since my neighbor is a fabulous cook and eager to reciprocate. Even if he doesn’t, it’s all good.

Wobbly and Transparent Windows on Linux

I’m not so much up on the latest and greatest news on the Linux platform, so please excuse my ignorance here. I did minimal research to bring you this news.

There are some cool Avalon-like Windowing magic coming to Fedora and thus the rest of the Linux world. It’s all based on a new OpenGL based window/compositing manager called Luminocity, written as a “toy” project by Owen Taylor.

From what I can tell, it’s not revolutionary technology like I feel Avalon is. More like smoke and mirrors. It doesn’t seem like Luminocity is a generalized graphics renderer. It seems more like a window manager that can take 2D content, warp it in 3D, and then rasterize the result s on top of your display. You still rely on “plain old X” to draw the contents of a Window and then Luminocity will go and warp and twist the 2D rendered surface.

Avalon, on the other hand, creates a display list of hardware-accelerated primitives that can be arbitrarily played with at any level in the hierarchy.

If you go down the page (on the “cool” link, above). You will see some cool widget rendering samples based on some technology called, “Cairo”. Funny how Cairo used to be the code-word for a “future” Windows release that never really was, but which Windows 2000, Windows XP, and Longhorn have some elements of.

 

March 25, 2005

More machine upgrade blues

I still haven’t quite finished by father-in-law’s computer upgrade. The problem with that machine is that it’s just old. I wrote about that before. However, that one’s pretty much in the bag.

As luck would have it, my neighbor dropped off two more machines this morning. The problem with these machines is spyware. Holy bleeping crap this crap is a problem.

I manage three PC’s at home and none of them have spyware… as far as I know. Even before I installed Microsoft’s AntiSpyware beta, there were only two or three pretty harmless offenders on these machines and they are long gone. I attribute the low crap-count mainly to my use of Firefox instead of IE, Windows XP service pack 2, and that I avoid shady programs like Kazaa (not sure if that’s even a download anymore) and others.

So, my kids are asleep and my wife is out on the town with her girlfriend so I thought I’d try and help out. My neighbor’s machines had over 80 spyware/malware programs on each machine and each machine was useless!

After a few hours or scans, safe mode command-line ninja work, the machines are still fucked. They are usable, but I get blue screens like this one on the soon-to-be reformatted laptop:

DSC00007

I got that when I was re-installing Windows XP SP2, which I’m re-installing since I suspect something is corrupted with their winlogon.exe or explorer.exe… or a DLL that one of these loads.

My gut tells me a pesky piece of malware senses it’s end is near and cleveryly brings down the machine to thwart my goals.

Automating Photoshop in .NET

I found this great link (via Joe Beda’s blog) to a guy who tinkered with the Photoshop CS automation interface. This is not a new trick, but what seems new is the way the ScriptListener plugin was used to log the automation actions Photoshop takes when you do things manually and reverse engineering the necessary script commands.

Here is my tryout of some of the things written about in the link above.

With photoshop running with a few documents loaded, this code:

Ps_auto_code

Produces this console output:

Ps_auto_run

 

Avalon gorgeousness

This stuff makes me drool for Avalon. While I don’t plan on writing any apps that look that good, the point is that everything will look that good by default.

My Avalon vision… where closing a window causes it to explode into butterflies, which fly away with the wind.

Ruby

I’m tinkering with Ruby tonight. Tim Germer keeps yapping about how good Ruby on Rails is so I thought I’d check it out once I read up on ruby. My web host is a dedicated Debian Linux host and I can’t see a Debian RPM here, so who knows if I can use this stuff.

Like eons before when I ran through the Python Tutorial, I’m now going through the Ruby Tutorial (or at least the #1 link in my google search on “Ruby Tutorial”).

We’ll see how it goes.

Now playing: New York Public Radio - The Leonard Lopate Show - Stephen Petronio -03/24/2005

March 24, 2005

First Astrophotos

These photos completely suck, but when my bracket came in the mail I had to set the telescope up and try it out.

The bracket I got is a crude way to aim the camera at the eyepiece. Before I get into serious gear, I might as well figure out how to best use this crappy gear.

Anyway, here are the photos I took. Most are out of focus since I had to perform a delicate balance between:

  • Making sure all bolts were tight
  • Telescope was focused
  • Camera was focused

DSC00001

DSC00002

DSC00003

DSC00004

DSC00005

DSC00006

 

March 23, 2005

Ink Yourself

I have a venerable HP Deskjet 990cse color printer which I bought a few years ago. I have learned to love this little machine for its speed, quality, and excellent drivers.

Probably like a lot of you, but not all, I like to print a lot of stuff. I might print maps for trips, bills, maps and graphics for D&D, and pictures of my kids. I don’t want to worry about how much the ink costs and I like to have extra cartridges laying around so I’m never without the ability to print.

The reality of the situation is, of course, that ink cartridges are very expensive. I did my best to find bargains over the years but I could say at most $5 from the $35–$40 list price of these babies.

So, I was intrigued by the lure of paying half-price for refurbished inkjet cartridges at a new Cartridge World store near my house. This is the place that parks a horrendously decorated yellow punchbuggy (or other sub-compact) outside the storefront to attract customers.

I handed in my old cartridge and got a new one back. I though this strange since I wanted them to fill the one I gave them. I knew that I took care of it and since the actual printheads are a physical part of the cartridge, I figure I can keep track and chuck it after I felt it had seen enough use.

to make a long story short, I started to get totally crappy cartridges from them and I eventually got fed up. Sure, they guarantee quality but they won’t do anything m ore than replace the cartridge with problems with another that probably still has problems.

The only good thing that I got out of my handful of visits to these folks were some tips on how to care for the cartridges. Such detailed instructions made it clear to me that lots of people will probably ignore these instructions and continually hand in damaged cartridges which will wind up in my hands and will inevitably produce crappy prints.

There had to be a better way.

I headed over to Pacific Ink and bought a refill kit for my hp78 color cartridge for $14.99 plus $3.85 in shipping. A new cartridge from HP direct costs $34 with free shipping. The refill kit is advertised to be good for two refills. This means that instead of paying $34 twice more, I spent $14.99 once. I guess this is a savings of $49.16. If I can get away with a second ink refill kit on the same new cartridge then I’d save another $49.16.

I don’t know how difficult the filling process will be, but I’ll definitely blog about the experience when I perform it for the first time. Here is a picture of the kit. Not for the faint of heart, I suppose.

DSC00014

 

March 19, 2005

Refurbishing old machines

I currently have the joy of refurbishing my father-in-law’s home computer. I’ve had it for months and he started asking about it.

It’s an old Pentium 2 with MMX, running at a whopping 366 MHz with 64MB of RAM. The system software that shipped with the machine is Windows 98.

The machine’s 6GB hard drive was dead. It didn’t finish a boot and I had to use one of my spare 20GB drives to replace it. When I hooked up the 6GB drive to an external enclosure, It was unreadable by my Windows XP Professional machine. So, sayonara.

Without boring you too much, there is a lesson to this post. So bear with me a bit longer.

The re-install needed the Win98 product key. I had all of the original discs, but no product key. I googled, asked friends, and eventually called Gateway to try and get the product key… or any product key for that matter. I wasted a lot of time to find out that the certificate of authenticity that came with the machine was a no-lose item. I needed it to re-install.

I eventually came to my senses and called by father-in-law who loves in Pennsylvania. He had the certificate and I was able to complete the install.

Save the paperwork!

Now playing: Bob and Brooke - On The Media 03/18/05

Comets for 2005

I get this really good newsletter from Sky and Telescope every week that describes what’s good to see in the heavens in the coming days, weeks, or months. You don’t need to subscribe to their magazine to get the newsletter. It contains some ads, so the more the merrier. Subscribe here:

http://SkyandTelescope.com/shopatsky/emailsubscribe.asp

I made a targetted Google request to specifically find out what comets might be good to see in 2005. I kind of missed Machholz’s brightest showing in February and early March. I suppose I could try and hunt for it but I think it’s too dim for me to find.

Anyway, I found a nice site which talks about all of the comets that we might see in 2005 (none visible to the naked eye). The author goes off on a bunch of history on each comet, which was very interesting.

2005 Comets

An interesting programming project popped into my head. I have to think about it a bit more since there is a lot of software out there and the idea is probably implemented already.

The idea is to plugin to Outlook or otherwise present an annual calendar of astronomical events. The calendar would obviously be decorated with the phases of the moon, phases of the inner planets, positions of the Jovian and Saturnian moons. The calendar could access public weather data and show a 7–day forecast as icons in each day-box. You could plan observing sessions and put notes into any day, week, or month.

Battlemap

Since I never finished my BattleMap.net project, my friends and I need to do things the old fashioned way.

Map

This map represents a battle. We’re playing Dungeons & Dragons over Yahoo! voice chat. It’s pretty easy. The only time you need to be together is to share a map like this one. However, you can see how we can play Battleship and call out our positions as we progress from round to round of combat. Rolling dice is another reason why we might otherwise need to be together, but we use an honest system for that. We’re truthful with what we roll, until it really matters then we cheat. Just kidding!

We do this normally on Friday nights, but we seem to have a once a month track record this year… if that.

My friends Rob, Bruce, and John are hacking away tonight. Steve is MIA.

Here is some Download%20file'>theme music from the Diablo II video game. Remember, Primordial Ooze is a Podcast, in that I supply enclosure tags in my feed for mp3 links. Yes, I’m treading a thin line in considering myself a podcast. So, if you add me to your iPodder client, you’ll get some of my strange audio bits including the mystical music from this post.

Here is a picture of my desktop setup for tonight’s battle:

DSC00001

Notice, my friends, the premium Sierra Nevada Pale Ale next to my monitor. Mmmmm.

Now playing: Lascivious Biddies - You Don't Own Me

March 17, 2005

Observing log for March 17, 2005

I wanted to view the moon today since it’s in it’s first quarter (a half-moon) and I thought the terminator would yield a good set of shadowy craters to look at. Well, they did and it was kind of cool to watch.

I made the obligatory swing towards Saturn and I stayed up late enough to see Jupiter in all it’s glory. My wife even came out into the cold. This was her first time looking through the scope and she laughed out loud since the images are so outrageous to first-time observers.

Yes,  the planets are out there and they do look like you see in books. Just smaller in the eyepiece.

I tried to get my laptop to control the scope but failed. I’m close and I should have that working soon.

I ordered a cheap universal camera mount which I hope to use with my Sony F707 digital camera. Maybe some of these observing logs will start to contain pictures.

Finally, I was testing the auto-tracking of the scope and Saturn seems to be locked on for about 40 minutes and it still seems to be dead-center in the eyepiece. This is good but a long exposure will be the final judge.

 

 

Dinners, yum

A college buddy of mine has been blogging about the dinners he’s been cooking up. I find myself starving as I wait for my dinner to arrive (the shame of it).

March 16, 2005

The Incredibles DVD

I haven’t watched the DVD proper yet, but I had some time to check out the extra’s DVD. When I got home from work, my wife said that my son was in stitches watching something called “Jack-Jack Attack”.

I had to see it for myself.

It was a riot. If you remember in the movie, the babysitter had left a message for Elastic Girl saying that Jack-Jack was doing some weird things while the family was fighting Syndrome’s robot. Well, go buy the DVD and find out what was going on for yourself. It was a great short.

March 15, 2005

Mozilla beats out IE

At least as far as visitors to my site go.

Mozilla

March 14, 2005

Wonder Woman: I need both hands professor!

Click on the image below, to watch the 3MB QuickTime video. Obviously, they need to get these animators out more!

WonderWoman

Watch Justice League Unlimited on the Cartoon Network!

March 13, 2005

Scooby Doo Theme Song

My kids love having their headphones on while listening to music. For a long while they were fascinated with the soundtrack from Shrek. Now, they’re into the Scooby Doo theme song. For most of their listening, they like to sing along.

So, I strapped a headset to them and clicked record. I recorded each voice individually and did a simple mix using Audacity, the free, cross-platform sound editor..

Click here for a listen.

If anyone knows how I can remove or suppress the voices in the original mp3 of the song the kids were listening to, I’d love to add background music to this clip. That seems like an advanced, or impossible, task, however.

March 12, 2005

Observing log for 3/12/2005

I was able to get my telescope out tonight and do some observing of the late Winter sky. I’m not sure what the best title is for these logs, but I’ll try and be consistent.

I went out to East Moriches on Long Island, NY. This is about a 50–60 minute drive and Google Maps describes the route as follows:

WantaghToMoriches

The skies out there are considerably darker than they are by me. Still, they weren’t close to what you would find in upstate New York or other similarly desolate places.

We set the telescope up on my friend’s 2nd-story balcony. The balcony had a fantastic view of the Southeast sky which I thought my observing plan was focused on. Unfortunately, we needed to see the Western sky so we had to take the telescope apart and move it downstairs to his front yard. I can only attribute such a drastic mistake to my own ineptitude.

I wanted to see three main objects and a few others along the way. First, I wanted to show my friend Saturn since it’s directly overhead and easy to spot. Next came M42, the Great Nebulae in Orion. My next object was the Andromeda galaxy, M31.

Saturn came up fast and was a nearly perfect view. My friend and his wife were astounded. So was I. I had initialized and found the telescope’s guide stars almost instantly. I attribute this mainly to having calibrated the finder scope before it got dark.

I punched in M42 next and the motor drive skewed the telescope toward a fuzzy blue patch with a few bright stars in it. If I had a camera and I could do a long exposure, the fuzzy patch would have resolved into a very colorful nebulae. I really have to start thinking about astrophotography gear.

When I punched in the Andromeda galaxy, I was pushing my luck since it was only about 13 degrees above the horizon. No go. This is my second failed attempt to view our closest neighboring galaxy. I fired up Starry Night and found out why. Winter is simply not a good time to shoot for the galaxy. As you can see in the following shots, Andromeda gets higher and higher in the sky each month from June to October, 2005. These shots represent the 16th of each month, at 11pm.

AndromedaJune2005
11pm on June 16, 2005

AndromedaJuly2005
11pm on July 16, 2005

AndromedaAugust2005
11pm on August 16, 2005

AndromedaSeptember2005
11pm on September 16, 2005

AndromedaOctober2005
11pm on October 16, 2005

We were observing about an hour more than I had anticipated so at the end of the night, were  were surprised to get the opportunity to see Jupiter. Wow, what an awesome view! The bands were visible but I couldn’t see the Great Red Spot. I figure this was because Jupiter was very low on the horizon. I should expect much better views when it’s overhead.

A small tree was obstructing our vision so my friend and I took turns observing while the other pulled back the small tree. It was interesting to see how the image didn’t get blurry as a result of the construction, which was my first instinct. Instead, it just got dimmer which makes sense once you think about it.

 

Tae Kwon Do Test

My kids and I had a Tae Kwon Do test on Friday night. My kids were going from Orange to “High Orange” and I was getting another stripe (not a degree) on my black belt. For some reason, I don’t have any pictures of my kids’ test. My wife was watching the baby in the viewing area and she didn’t get an opportunity. When the kid’s test was over and the black belt test began, my Mom took the kids home and Lisa stayed and watched me.

A bunch of the students were getting their black belts for the first time. It’s a big event for them and it was pretty exciting.

Anyway, I have some of this crappy video that our little Sony digital camera took. No audio. It shows me breaking two boards. Enjoy!

BoardBreak

 

Snowy Saturday Morning

We had a nice snowfall last night and it turned out to be a beautiful sunny morning. I had planned on observing tonight, so maybe I’ll get my chance despite the snow.

DSC00008

March 10, 2005

Podcasts mentions...

I was mentioned on both the Northwest Noise and the Ken and Squip Show podcasts for the technical help I provided to Ken, from the latter named Podcast. If you listen the March 8 show of NWN or the February 28 episode of KASS,  you’ll hear the mention. Cool.

The Orion Arm

I’m sure everyone realizes that the Galaxy we live in is called the Milky Way. But did you know that our sun lies in the spiral arm known as the Orion Arm?

5000lys

Did you realize that many of the stars you see in the night sky are also located in the Orion arm? Only the brightest stars from other parts of the Milky Way are easy to spot, particularly in light-polluted skies like the ones I suffer with.

Orion is one of the easiest constellations to recognize in Northern skies largely due to the brightness of Betelgeuse and Rigel and the amazing alignment of the stars that comprise Orion’s belt.

Orion

Do you see how Orion’s belt and Betelgeuse are represented in the first image? In the image above, Betelgeuse is the upper-right shoulder of the constallation… assuming right is to the right in the image. Did you notice how close Betelgeuse and our Sun are in the first image? The following video, which shows a trip from the Sun to Mintaka (one of the stars on Orion’s belt), makes it very clear that Betelgeuse is very close to us and as soon as we start approaching Mintaka, Beletgeuse zooms out of our view.

See the video.

UPDATE: Sorry, newbie that I am, I confused Betelgeuse for Bellatrix. Bellatrix is the star on the right. The really bright star on the left is Betelgeuse.

iTunes headache

I’ve been suffering through an awful problem with iTunes and my iPodder lemon client. I never suspected that the problem had to do with the iPodder client, but it just so happens that Podcasts coming in every day made the problem more than a little annoying.

Since I fixed the problem, and don’t care to reproduce it, I don’t have an exact error dialog image nor do I have the exact wording of the error message that I was receiving.

Basically, I had a permissions problem and I failed to diagnose the issue before literally months went by.

Two directories are important when you’re sucking down Podcasts. One is your iTunes music folder, usually in something like:

C:\Documents and Settings\nic\My Documents\My Music\iTunes

or

%USERPROFILE%\My Documents\My Music\iTunes

If you’re a command-line geek like me. The second important directory if your music folder. I changed my music folder to D:\Music Library instead of using a subfolder of the above iTunes directory. I  did this mainly because my earlier setup had my C: drive squeezed for space. D: had plenty, so there you are.

Anyway, permissions on my D:\Music Library were way fucked up. It seems like “Administrators” had all the permissions they need. Yes, I run as Administrator, shoot me. However, there was an additional permission on that directory with my specific username that was largely screwed up. Since Windows uses a least-common-denominator approach to permissions, the net permissions were simply in error.

I fixed the permissions, removing the “nic” permissions and relying on the Administrator default. Things seem to be working fine.

It’s such an unfortunate turn of events. My philosophy usually is not to mess with permissions until I want to share something and limit access. I’m surprised that such a corrupt-looking permission set made it’s way into my setup.

Apple has some knowledgebase entries on this problem. The weird thing is that when I first tried to research this in January, the resolutions weren’t available!

Now playing: Adam Christianson - MC-2005-03-09

March 9, 2005

Cool use of the Flickr API

This guy created some cool Time Graphs showing at what time people chose photos with such tags as “sunset”, “breakfast”, “lunch”, and “dinner.”


Tag Graph: Sunsets by time
Originally uploaded by jbum.

Now playing: Adam Curry - DSC-2005-03-08

March 8, 2005

Topics

The more I stress about the fact that I’ve stopped blogging about programming topics, the more I want to post meaningless minutia from my life.

Stay tuned for the minutia.

March 7, 2005

Sunrise for March 7, 2005

This morning’s sunrise. If the cloud cover was a little bit less,  this would have been spctacular. Also, if the photographer were someone besides me, things would have turned out better.

In any case, this is my new favorite vantage point since Seaford Avenue cuts such a nice beeline to the morning sun. At least at this time of year!

Sunrise, March 7, 2005

 

March 6, 2005

Backups!

Every night at 3am, I backup just about everything on my primary drives to a backup drive. The logic here is that the probability that two hard drives will fail at the same time are next to nothing. Of course, if the physical machine is stolen or damaged by, God forbid, a fire or something, then I lose everything (of course, this is the least of my worries in such an event).

In any case, this nightly automated process just saved my ass!

My machine kind of froze, as one of my applications stopped responding even to logoff and Task Manager “kill process” attempts. I had to power cycle the box.

When I restarted and launched Mozilla Thunderbird (my e-mail client), I was prompted with a dialog reminiscent of a first-time install. My entire e-mail store and profile had been irrevocably corrupted.

No problem. I fired up StompSoft BackupMyPC, found last night’s restore file, selected:

C:\Documents And Settings\nic\Application Data\Thunderbird

in the restoration tree and clicked restore. In seconds, I was reading e-mail again. If it weren’t for my mackup job, and the backup software, I would have been screwed beyond belief. As it was, I was back in business in far shorter time than it takes me to write this blog entry.

The morale of the story is, backup your data or you will suffer the consequences.

I really should burn a dozen or so DVD’s and store these in a fire box, safe, or safety deposit box at my local bank just to be ultra sure.

Also, anothe tip, CD’s and DVD’s  that you burn yourself will only last about 10 years from what I hear. Best to date every disc you burn and when you notice one is about to expire, take advantage of the digital media and make a perfect copy before it becomes  unreadable!

Now playing: The Eagles - Hotel California

March 2, 2005

Saturn Wallpaper

A friend pointed me toward a huge mosaic of Saturn constructed from 126 images taken from the Cassini space probe. The image is huge, so I chopped it up and created this image which works nicely as a desktop background. I cropped the image and flipped it to make it’s appearance more attractive beneath your stock quotes and e-mail messages.

Provided as a 24–bit lossless PNG. You may need to convert this to a BMP on Windows, a JPG or PICT file on the Mac.

Saturn

What’s so cool is that the Solar System Simulator lets you see this. Since the picture was supposedly taken on Oct 6, 2004, I punched that in and got this image:

Wspace

The tilt of Saturn seems right, but the day/night position (the terminator, for you astro-geeks) seems off, doesn’t it? I suppose that the probe could be rotated and the SSS is depicting a perfect North is Up kind of image, but still I suppose there is an error somewhere. The probe took the picture from the left or right of this image.

Just to prove to everyone that I’m a complete geek, I simulated the Cassini scene, as best I could on the date in question, and provide this simulated image using Starry Night:

SaturnStarryNight

Now playing: Bill Powers - Fantasy Focus

March 1, 2005

Happy March

It’s March already and spring is just around the corner. The topics I cover in this blog have drifted far from programming and I really mean to change that.

February was a wash for my drawing project. It seems as if I spent the entire month researching my telescope purchase. Now that that’s done, I hope to start my machine and geometric shape drawing project.

It will be a while before I get my feet wet with astrophotography. I think that’s an awesome topic to blog about. I doubt I can keep up with APOD, of course!

A colleague pointed me to a new camera from Canon that is designed to be “astrophotography” friendly as there are no coatings that block the wavelengths that are vital to taking pictures of celestial objects. I’m eyeing that as a future purchase unless I research something better.

I remain pretty committed to not creating multiple blogs for all of the different things I write about. However, I will probably create category feeds at some point so people can filter out topics they don’t care to read about.

Enjoy March. I hope it’s a good month for you.

Immutable user base?

My latest attempt to gain more readers by posting a video of me pulling apart my fingernail under a microscope neither attracted nor dereailed my userbase. I remain at a flat 12 subscribers:

Latest_stats

I’ll have to do something more horrible soon, just to shake things up a bit.