Surprisingly I managed to image the PANSTARRS comet this evening even though I was looking in the wrong place!…
Nabbing PANSTARRS: Surprisingly got it.
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Author Archives: steve
Openindiana: How could the developers go so wrong?
Well, today I’ve been playing with OpenIndiana, the OpenSolaris derivative created after Oracle killed off its ancestor.
Well, to say that I was rather disappointed would be an understatement. It’s rather obvious that the developers of the distribution are not system administrators of integrated networked environments otherwise they would not have made such stupid design decisions.
Anyway, here’s the story of my day:
I downloaded the live DVD desktop version initially as I assumed that this would, when installed, effectively replicate a Solaris desktop environment. Seeing as Solaris in this configuration is capable of being a fully functional server as well I assumed that this would be the case for Openindiana.
So, I created a virtual machine under VirtualBox on the Mac, booted the DVD image and started the install. I was surprised about how little interaction there was during the install process as all it asked about was how to partition the disk and to create a root password and a new user. After the install things went down hill.
Now, it seems that the Openindiana bods are trying to ape Linux. When you boot up you get a GDM login screen, but can’t log in as root. So, you log in as the user you created, not too much of a problem, except that you now can’t start any of the configuration applications, they fail silently after you type the root password. You can’t sudo commands as it says that you don’t have permission…
Finally, I managed to get past this roadblock by trying ‘su -‘ which then asked me to change the root password! Once this was done I could actually run the configuration utilities. Not that it got me very much further, as there seems to be no way to set a static IP address out of the box.
I decided to trash that version and download the server version DVD. Maybe that would be better? Surely it would, it’s designed to be a server…
I booted the DVD image and the text installer started, very similar to the old Solaris installer to begin with, except all it asked about again was the disk partitioning, root password/user creation and networking, giving only the options for no networking or automatic network configuration. There was no manual network configuration! What?!!!! This is a server install!
Also missing from the installer was any way of setting up network authentication services or modifying what was installed. The installer had been lobotomised.
Once the OS had installed and booted up there were some more nasty surprises. Again, you couldn’t set a static IP address and any changes to the networking were silently reverted. It was only with some Googling that I managed to hunt down the culprit, the network/physical:nwam service, which is the default configuration. WHY?!!! This is a SERVER not a laptop!
Once this was fixed I managed to at least get a static IP address set up but it’s far more convoluted than with Solaris 10 or before.
Other strangeness in the design… All the X installation is there, except for the X server. Eh? What’s the point of that?
By default the GUI package manager isn’t installed. Once you do, however, it’s set up by default not to see any not installed packages, which is confusing. If you know where to look you can change this but it’s a stupid default.
Getting NFS client stuff working was a challenge as well. When you manually run mount everything seems to work out of the box. NFS filesystems mount fine and everything looks dandy. So, you put some mounts into /etc/vfstab and ‘mount -a‘ works as expected. Reboot, however, and nothing happens! This is due to the fact that most of the NFS client services are not turned on by default but magically work if you run mount. Turning on the nfs/client:default service doesn’t enable the other services it requires, however, but you don’t see this until a reboot. Stupid! It should work the same way at all times. If it works magically on the command line it should work at boot as well and vice versa. Unpredictability on a server is a killer.
On the bright side, at least the kernel is enterprise grade.
Time fos a sound check…
It’s now 12:12:12 on the 12/12/12. i.e.
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Mary had a little lamb, it’s fleece was as white as snow.
*tap* *tap* *tap*
Elite: Dangerous, possibly the ultimate Elite-type game?
In a musing on my old blog site situated at LiveJournal eight years ago I outlined my idea for the best multi-player virtual Universe.
In November David Braben announced a new Kickstarter project to attempt to fund the very long awaited fourth Elite game in the series, “Elite: Dangerous” and this time it’s networked!
Elite: DangerousFrom the description so far it looks as though the procedural Universe creation is very similar to that I thought of in my original LiveJournal posting all those years ago, at least down to the star system level. At least in the first iteration there’s not going to be any chance to exit your ship and wander around the planets etc. But that’s fine.
The only problem I see is with rather large amount of money the Kickstarter project is asking for, £1.25 million! The fund raising is more than half the way through and still the pledges are only just above the half way mark and the rate of increase is slow. Somehow I don’t see it reaching the funding target by the 5th January.
I’ve put my money where my mouth is and pledged as much as I can reasonably afford. If you too would like to see Elite IV come into being then go over to Kickstarter and help with the fund raising.
Update: New video of gameplay:
Planets a-hoy! The benefits of getting up early.
It was an early start, 4:30am to be precise, but that’s the only time when you can catch anything really photogenic in the sky from my back garden at the moment as I’ve yet to get beyond the light pollution for the deep sky objects.
So, yes, the early start, at “stupid o’clock.”
It was a beautiful morning. The sky had lost all of the high, con-trail derived cloud from the night before, which had obscured practically everything and the air was still. It was chilly enough to need a hat and fleece but otherwise comfortable. The stars shone but were nothing beside Venus, the Moon and Jupiter.
Seeing as Jupiter had for so long been out of view I immediately slewed the telescope around to point to it, looked in the eye-piece, focused and discovered that the shadow of one of the moons was passing across the face and was close to the edge. I needed to be quick to be able to catch it in an image so rushed the “Imaging Source” camera out of its box, fitted the Baader filter and the Powermate 2.5x magnifier and started up the software.
After some critical focusing I pressed the “Capture” button and streams of data passed onto the hard disk. I’d made it. Little did I know that the first real capture was the best of the night, which, after later processing, produced this image:
5:09am: Jupiter with Europa (lower left) and Io (upper right). Europa’s shadow is just leaving the edge of the face of Jupiter.
After almost an hour of imaging Jupiter, with the glow of dawn swiftly growing, I turned my attention to the Moon. There, in the stark contrast on the edge of the illuminated half sat the crater Copernicus. Such an intricate crater with its ejector field strewn around it. So, this became my second target of the morning:
6:03am: The lunar crater Copernicus.
With light levels increasing and sunrise son to be upon me there was only last target, Venus.
Because I’m hardly ever up this early and because I have no view of the western sky from the observatory I’ve never actually imaged Venus before. This time I didn’t bother removing the camera from the focuser but hoped I’d be able to find the planet using the finder scope only. It took a while to fully centre in on it but eventually I did. After a few minutes of tweaking the exposure, I took my final image of the day:
06:14am: Venus shining brightly.
And so, that was that. I stowed away the telescope, shut off everything, closed the roof and came indoors, and off back to bed for a couple of hours.
Geological Interpretation of a Curiosity Rover Image.
Geological sketch of Mount Sharp, Mars.
Having seen some of the glorious images sent back by NASA’s Curiosity (Mars Science Laboratory) rover and the rather (geologically) uninformative BBC News and NASA/JPL reports upon them I thought I’d create a geological sketch interpretation. So, here it is:
Horizontally bedded rocks on Earth are generally laid down in water, so the lower unit was most likely to have been deposited in a wet environment.
Large scale cross bedded rocks are usually sub-arial wind-blown deposits, as in sand dunes. The bedding being the shadow of the trailing slope of the dunes as they march across the landscape. What you see left behind is the root of the dune.
The scale in the image is hard to gauge but seeing as the scarp is a couple of miles from the rover, the size of the dunes which generated the cross bedded units must have been many hundreds of metres high.
It should also be noted that the top of the lower, horizontally bedded unit seems to be an uneven erosional surface, suggesting a large time gap between the lower unit’s deposition and that of the upper unit.
Astronomical events: February to May
My last update on my astronomical exploits was way back at the beginning of February. At that point I’d just got the new telescope installed and Mars was getting closer to opposition.
Between then and the end of May was quite a busy time in the sky when it came to planetary observation as Mars continued to be visible from my back garden for much of the time and Saturn came out to play as well. Unfortunately, after the third week in May both planets were obscured by the house by the time dusk fell. Even so, I managed to get some decent images.
Mars
I’d already managed to get one good image of the planet by the beginning of February but due to cloud cover the the next opportunity wasn’t until early March. Thankfully, there was a short period of very good seeing, allowing me to even image clouds developing within the atmosphere.
Details on the surface weren’t that clear, but that was partly due to the low quality of the camera and its low speed with the light levels available. Once the atmosphere became more turbulent the results were no-where as good.
So, I decided to buy a better quality planetary camera. The resolution was still 640×480 but its noise levels were far lower, so that even without getting the colour balance correct on the first go I managed to get a far better image:
Unfortunately, by the end of March the weather closed in and the next time I could get out to view the sky was in May.
By the middle of May the planet was rapidly receding from view, markedly shrinking and becoming harder to image, especially as by the time it was visible it was almost behind the house. However, because of the change of angle, it was far easier to see that it was indeed a sphere as it was easy to see its phase:
Before long, however, it became impossible to image.
Saturn
Saturn wasn’t easily visible from my garden until the clouds cleared in May, which gave me only a few short weeks in which to view and image it before it too disappeared behind the house and into the dusk. Also, most evenings the sky was just too unstable to get decent images of the planet given the amount of magnification required. Having said all that I did manage a few really pretty decent images such as this:
