Linkstew

Last night I went to the star viewing on the roof of Campbell hall.

Even to the naked eye Jupiter and Venus were stunningly bright, and Saturn was also easily spotted, and I was able to spot those three even as I was walking to Campbell at dusk. I wasn't quite sure who was Mars and who was Mercury until I got to Campbell hall and someone pointed out the barely visible blips, but Mercury was already so low that I wouldn't have been able to see it from the ground anyway.

After the initial naked eye tour of the sky, we went inside the telescope dome, where we checked out Mercury and Venus and Jupiter and Saturn and the Orion Belt at 225 x magnification. Mercury and Venus were frankly both kind of boring, with their most interesting aspects being the rainbow patterns caused by their light passing through Earth's atmosphere. Seeing the moons of Jupiter was pretty cool, but the telescope didn't want to focus so it was kind of hard to make out any features of the planet. And while the Orion Belt was pretty sexy, it was really Saturn that knocked my socks off. For some reason, being able to see the rings of Saturn through the telescope was just one of the coolest things I've seen in a long time.

I think I'm going to have to go to the viewing again next week, when Mars, Venus, and Saturn are all going to apparently be even closer to each other in the sky. I hope it's clear. If you're interested in checking things our yourself, this site provides some nice pictures giving you a clue of what you should be looking for. In particular, it looks like Mars and Saturn and Venus will be doing some interesting things around May 4th which should be visible with the naked eye, and with a pair of binoculars you should be able to make out quite a bit more.

And as long as I'm talking about Astronomy, this java app provides neat demonstrations of the orbits of the moons of the planets of the solar system. In particular, Saturn and Jupiter (with their impressive collections of satellites) are definitely worth looking at.

Last night, someone uttered the phrase "the howling fantods," which I thought was an absolutely fabulous phrase. The thing was, I assumed that fantod was some nonsense word. But when I got home, I looked fantod up, and amazingly enough, fantod is legit.

Unfortunately, all the various dictionaries I'm looking in are giving me slightly different answers about what it means. One source tells me it means "State of worry or excitement; fidget; fuss;" Another source says it's simply "nervous anxiety." Another source still says it's "A crotchety way of acting; a fad." and "a., Fidgetty, restless."

Gah, this uncertainty over what the word means gives me the howling fantods!

First up, for those of you running OS X 10.1, a couple of security updates were posted to Software Update. So update your system and feel warm and fuzzy and safe when you're done. These updates are not system enhancements, so there are no new features, bug fixes, or enhancements.

For you blogger users, there's Blogscript, which sends the contents of your clipboard flying at your blog with the simple selection of a menu item from Apple's Script menuand the confirmation of a button click. I tried it out, and I liked it and I'd use it regularly... if I used Blogger.

In the pure conjecture department, here are some suggestions for the future of the Dock. There are some neat ideas there -- especially the part about "Customizable Dock" with user defined section ordering. Check it out and if you like what you see please send your feedback to apple.

Say... Where's the feedback link on Microsoft's Windows site, anyway?

For the geeks in the audience, here are a pair of bad ideas for your Services menu. PerlService allows you to send text from any program to be executed by perl and have the results replace the original code, while Terminal Services gives you an easy way to execute arbitrary shell commands and get the results back. Both of these are very dangerous, but totally rock if you know what you're doing.

In the classic Mac OS, and on my linux box, I'm a window shading fiend, and so OS X really leaves me out in the cold. WindowShade X (a $7 shareware program) promises to solve all that, by bringing Window Shading to OS X. The problem is, this version only shades windows for carbon applications, which leaves me out in the cold, because the only carbon application I run regularly is the Finder. But, they promise that a future version will bring equality to the window shading universe, and shade cocoa apps as equals. And when that time comes, they will have my $7 as fast as I can give it to them. And I can't wait.

Finally, for you PowerBook/iBook owners, DoubleCommand is the best thing, ever. Boy, my right thumb suddenly because useful something other than hitting the space bar. Now I just need a control key on the right side of my PowerBook, so that my right-handed self can control-click by hitting the right control key with my pinky and clicking with my thumb. Ah well, back to dreaming.

I hope you OS X users found this list useful; It's just something I've been gathering since 10.1 came out, and I figured I'd share it now.

So one of the many pieces of the project I was working on last week is a cron job which runs every fifteen minutes and emails me the output. I'm very tired of getting emails that look like this:

Finished cron at 999900027, synced 5399 records

Now, for those of you who don't do unix, that time format is usually referred simply to as "unixtime", and it's just the total number of seconds that have passed since January 1, 1970 GMT.

And every fifteen minutes, for the last week, I've been getting emails letting me k2now that my cron finished at 999932426, or at 999948638, or at 999985529, or at 999990999, or at 999999953, and so on. And so for the last week, I've been frequently reminded of the impending roll over of unixtime.

I find amusing to that unixtime is hitting nine 9s (followed by nine 0s) on 9/9 (GMT).

But as of 2001-09-08 6:46:40PM out here in the Pacific Time Zone, One Billion Seconds of UNIX goodness have elapsed.

I was studying geography for my final tomorrow, and I read about Mt. Krakatoa and Pinatubo in the Phillipines, and I was curious to find out more info about them. My quick search, however, only turned up this BBC Documentary about SuperVolcanoes before I had to return to my studying. It's a good page with good content, though, so check it out. It is a little scary, though, reading about those things.

I remember a long time ago when Mike Drrrr and I were playing Kings Quest VI, and one of the characters exclaimed "Zounds!" Now, Mike and I thought that was pretty funny, because we'd never heard such a silly phrase. Many, many years later, I found out it was apparently a British word.

Even more later, I learned the derivation of the word. A long time ago, there was an exclamation that went "By Gods Wounds!" That was a slightly unwieldy phrase, so it was later shortened to "swounds", which was eventually slurred to become "Zounds!"

Today in class it occured to me that Japanese also has seven days of the week, and Japanese also calls Sunday "Day of the Sun" and Monday "Day of the Moon." So I found myself wonder why they were so like Western names for the days of the week. I figure that, since the months in Japanese are called "First Moon", "Second Moon", etc, that dividing a moon into four groups of seven was logical. Also, the names of the days of the week have enough significance that I suspect they predate 1860. So, armed with these questions, I found this page, which seems to not only answer my questions, but answer related questions and generally be informative. I'd summarize here, but I'd do the page a disservice.

If you do anything with forms, then this is a handy tidbit. This bit of info explains how to use an image as the submit graphic of a form in place of an ugly (on certain platforms) "Submit!" button.

I went bowling last week with ResComp, and I became very curious about just where this game came from... So I went and found out. Check out this alt.sports.bowling FAQ to find out... Very interesting. Wacky egyptians.

One day I was in #blackbox on irc.debian.org, and the subject of astrology came up. Someone mentioned that Astrology was even more bogus than it obviously was because the earth wobbles, meaning the position of the planets relative to the months has moved slightly. Simple enough. Later that night, I was going out to do an appointment, and I walked past Seth in the hallway, who was talking to someone about how the Astrology signs were off from what they originally were...

I had been talking to Ms. Kiser on the telephone, and the topic of people not knowing how to pronounce her last name came up. She said people got confused because the 'a' had been left out. So this got me talking about how Julius Caesar was pronounced Ki-zer, as there are no soft c's in latin. Where, after all, do you think the German title Kaiser came from? And the Russian title tzar, Csar came from? After the phone call, I got on IRC, and one of the first things that Mr. Pi asked me was something about Caesar. When I finally went to read, I picked up Deadeye Dick, by Kurt Vonnegut. Halfway through Chapter 2 of that novel, Vonnegut writes "He said that the original [house] might have been a medieval granary built on the ruins of a Roman watchtower from the time of Juilius Caesar. Caesar was murdered two thousand years ago."