Roland Roberts's blog

There's an interesting article on the solar wind on Science News today. For those of you too young to remember (and, ahem, those of us old enough to start having trouble remembering), the Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft launched back in the 1970s are still plugging away returning interesting data on the nature of the solar wind from way past Pluto.

I finally had time to try reprocess this image using data from the August 31 outing. Much better, but I still need some practice.

I was asked to look into groupware for a grant project. Okay, I know there are several freebies out there that shouldn't be too hard to set up. So I looked around and did a little reading and saw that really, it was hard to choose. I mean, there are some that are not well developed, but beyond some threshold, its hard to choose without actually using the thing just to see how it behaves. So, I started installing them on my laptop to play around with.

We spent the long weekend in upstate New York at a friends house on the Delaware River. Naturally, I couldn't resist taking the astrophotography equipment. I took the AstroTrac, the laptop, and everything needed to shoot with my Canon 350D. Friday night was a wash-out, but that was expected. Sunday night looked like it might work, so I set up everything. But by the time I got the boys settled into bed, the fog rolled down the river bed and sent me in. Sunday night looked much better and I ended up setting up then catnapping while the computer took pictures.

In my quest to build a Linux replacment for DSLRFocus, I'm hitting a steep learning curve with Glade, Gtk, and gPhoto. I'm making progress, but it is slow. I've also come to realize that sometimes "best practices" can get in the way. What do I mean?

Okay, I'm a physicist, but I kinda slept through the optics part, so I'm okay on the concept of dispersion and having index of refraction being a function of wavelength, but I'm a little weak on just what that Abbe number means in absolute terms. But I do know bigger is bettter (as far as keeping dispersion low). Here's what I found on materials.

I took a trip to my local optometrist this afternoon as I need new glasses. Having joined the over-40 crowd a few years ago, I've taken to wearing bifocals. I gave up on the progressive lens version as I simply couldn't get used to them. That's apparently a common problem, but annoying to find out after the fact since not only could I not get used to them but they cost more, too.

Okay, this is not an astronomy topic, but I got stumped on this for a long time and searching the web, while helpful, didn't make it exactly obvious. Why would you even want to change GID or UID? Well, I needed to synchronize UID and GID with my NFS server for file sharing. We have two Macs and the accounts had been set up at different times so the UIDs were not the same. I'd already modified everything on the server to match my wife's iMac G5, and changed things on my Linux laptop to match both of those, so now I had to make the MacBook match the other machines.