• The Author – Bart Busschots

  

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If you run Windows the question as to which free sky mapping software to install is trivial, install Cartes du Ciel. If you run Linux, the question is equally as trivial, use KStars. However, if you run Mac OS X things have traditionally not been so good. I have not found a single good free sky mapping program for OS X. So, instead I have switched my attention to getting either the Linux option or the Windows option working on the Mac.

I had hopped that CrossOver Mac would run Cartes du Ciel but it does not. I tried both V2.7 and the version 3.0 beta but, although both installed, neither worked. 2.7 did run better than 3.0 but failed to render the actual maps so it was still useless! That leaves us with just KStars. This does work on OS X but installing it is not as straightforward as one would hope.

[tags]Astronomy, OS X, Mac, KStars[/tags] Read more

Yesterday, Codeweavers released a public beta of CrossOver Mac. This software lets you run Windows programs on Intel Macs without rebooting, without running a virtual machine, and best of all, without installing Windows at all. I've been waiting for this since the switch to Intel, to me this is the Holly Grail! I don't consider BootCamp to be a proper solution, you have to buy Windows and you have to reboot to change OS. Parallels is a step in the right direction, but you still have to buy Windows and you have a large overhead because you have to run two OSes at the same time. CrossOver on the other hand utilises WINE technology to allow Windows Apps run straight on OS X. Your Windows Apps even share your regular file system and home directory. This means you have one file system, the OS X one, so your files are all in the one place and your Windows Apps are subject to OS X's security restrictions. The minute I read the news report on this I downloaded the beta and installed it. This is a quick review of my first impressions.

[tags]OS X, Windows, WINE, CrossOver[/tags] Read more

It's time to update our text books and websites etc. as we now have eight planets rather than nine. No, aliens didn't torpedo one out of the skies, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) have finally decided on a definition for a planet within our solar system and Pluto doesn't meet the criteria so it's been demoted to being a Dwarf Planet. Since the first time I ever gave it any real thought I've always felt that it was a mistake to call Pluto a planet. In fact I've blogged about this before: What exactly is a planet? At first I wasn't sure about the wording of this new definition but on reflection I think it was the best we could have hopped for and I'm now going to try convince you of that too!

[tags]Pluto, Planet, IAU[/tags] Read more

So apparently a small Irish company that specialises in computer security has turned the entire world of science on it's head. Wow …. I hear you say, that sounds great. Free energy for all and an end to the conservation of energy and most of thermodynamics. They must have provided some exceptionally compelling evidence for this dramatic claim. A demo for all the world to see. Lots of facts and figures and a big long detailed article in Nature or some other journal of that ilk. No. Not even a conference paper from a small conference no one has heard of or a sketch on the back of an envelope. In terms of science we got NOTHING. We are expected to believe that there will be free energy for all and that science has been wrong for centuries on foot of an expensive add in a financial news paper and a flashy web site. Go on … pull the other one!

[tags]Steorn, Science[/tags] 

Related links:

• The Steorn Website
• Steorn, I'm all out of faith – An article by Des Traynor outlining the evidence for and against and his theories on what's going on
• Steorn Watch
• Steorn's free energy seems curiously expensive – Article by Rupert Goodwins, thechnology editor of ZDNet UK 

I'm a huge fan of ImageMagick . I think it's great but I'm constantly and continuously disappointed by their lack of proper support for the Mac. It took them ages to get a binary release out for the Mac at all and even now, a year after the announcement of the Intel Macs and after Apple have compltely stopped selling PPC Macs the only binary release available for the Mac on the image Magic site is still for PPC. You can of course get the source and build it yourself but that's a bit of a mine-field because of the amount of libraries that you need first if you're to end up with a useful ImageMagick install. In the past I've wasted a lot of time and effort getting ImageMagick compiled properly on OS X. When I had to install it on an Intel Mac for the first time today I nearly cried when I saw that there was no binary release! However, my prayers were answered when I cam across this blog entry. I still had to build the lot myself but this took all the pain out of it!

[tags]ImageMagick, Intel Mac[/tags] 

Every time MS Update annoys me I'm quite quick to share my annoyance with the world so it seems only fair that I should do the same for Redhat's Up2date. I just wasted an entire afternoon baby-sitting Up2date when I had real work to be doing. I had two servers that had gotten a bit behind on their updates because they were taken out of production a few months ago and I guess the hope was that they'd never end up back in production. But, as Black Adder would say "needs must when fortune vomits in your kettle" so back into production these two dinosaurs are going. They are both running RHEL ES 4 so in terms of software they sure aren't dinosaurs but their hardware is far from cutting edge! But I digress, the point is I had to waste an entire afternoon babysitting Up2date because it sucks and that is just not good enough in my book. Read more

I've already explained that I think the fact that MS update lies to you is very bad HCI well the other day it did something at least as bad if not worse. Without my permission it rebooted by machine while I was out at lunch. Excuse me MS Update but how could you possibly know that I was not doing something very important over lunch? How could you know that I hadn't got unsaved work? How could you know that there was not someone depending on a shared resource on my machine? I don't think it's acceptable for an automated updated process to take it upon itself to reboot your machine without asking you first. Basically, I tell my computer what to do, it should not be the other way round!

[tags]Microsoft, Windows, HCI[/tags] 

This is the third part of a series of posts I've been working on for a while detailing what I think are the important hints for the final book in the Harry Potter Series. In the first part I looked at Petigrew's debt to Harry and in the second part I looked at Dumbledore's Unexplained Look of Triumph . In this part I'll be looking at the second book, The Prisoner of Azkaban, because JKR has said that it contains some very important clues for the seventh book. In this post I'll be explaining why I think House Elves are the big clue from this book. Read more

First off, I'm very annoyed with myself for forgetting to write up my predictions before WWWDC 2006. I put this oversight down to the fact that I was on Holidays till today but I'm still annoyed, now you'll just have to take my word on what I predicted rather than having a post to prove it! Anyhow, in this post I'll just give you the highlights of the keynote and particularly the Leopard preview and also lay out some of my concerns. Read more

I was away from work for two weeks and this is what my Thunderbird icon lookes like now:

Right, well I’m off process this lot. Fun fun!

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