Lunar Eclipse

Gavin Olson - 2/21/2008 10:14

Last night there were pretty good conditions for viewing the lunar eclipse from my back yard (as good as can be had with the blasted casino throwing light into the sky anyway). I managed to get some pictures of the totality with my camera that at least show the color, if not a lot of detail (there's a limit to what you can do with 3x zoom). Perhaps by 2010, I will be sufficiently equipped to take a proper shot through a telescope, and have some sort of tracker constructed so I can make longer exposures (at present I can only manage about 15s before the movement of the Earth becomes oppressive). Without further ado, here's my favorite:

I took it with my Panasonic Lumix DMC-FX07. It's a pretty simple, inexpensive point and shoot, but has a number of pretty good features. With optical stabilization (the lense moves to reduce shaking) and the ability to take exposures as long as 1 minute, I find it to be a very good product for the money. I was going to provide a link to Panasonic's website, but it seems to have been discontinued. The closest match I can find is the FX30.

Hardware Woes

Gavin Olson - 2/21/2008 9:57

Attentive (and likely irritated) readers will remember that nearly a year ago I began writing about my component selections for a new desktop computer. I never got past the first part of that series, but the machine itself was a smashing success. Until recently, that is. Upon my return from a trip to the Frigid North to see friends, I found that when a program using 3D shaders started, the screen would go black and the system would become unresponsive.

A bit of background to fill in that abortive series about the new system. When I was building, the new GeForce 8 line of cards had just been released. Unfortuantely, they were priced at points above the most expensive of GeForce 7 parts. Being frugal, I decided to go with the older generation and selected the GeForce 7950 GT, which received positive reviews balancing performance to financial outlay. This card was also available from XFX with a massive radiator in place of a fan. Since one of my goals was to make this system (which sits near my bed) silent or near silent, I jumped at the opportunity. Until this recent failure, the card has delivered as promised, outputting zero noise and running any game I've thrown at it at top settings without a hitch. The first time I needed to consider turning anything down was with Unreal Tournament 3, where I dropped to a slightly lower AA level. Though the part is no longer on the market, I can strongly recommend these cards for someone building on the cheap, and XFX as a manufacturer for their novel cooling solution (which, by the way, doesn't obstruct the adjacent PCI slot).

Tests and component swaps found the problem to be linked to the graphics card, oddly limited to video games and Outlook 2007. Where AutoCAD and 3D Studio MAX ran without a hitch, deleting messages in Outlook offered about a 10% chance of locking the system. Ah, the oddities of software. Naturally distressed about the possibility of needing to replace one of the pricer components of my computer, I made a last ditch check of the manufacturer's website and found something grand: XFX offers a "double lifetime" warranty on its graphics cards. They will repair or replace the card forever, and I can transfer that same guarantee should I sell the card. Really amazing compared to any other technology warranty I've ever seen. Sure enough, once UPS managed to get the card to them, they checked it out and sent a replacement within a few days. Unfortunately FedEx is estimating 2 weeks to get it back, but XFX themselves have been nothing but quick and responsive in authorizing the return and making the replacement.

Paste

Gavin Olson - 1/31/2008 3:09

Just like the old site, and the site before that, there's now a pasting system implemented. Don't ask me why I'm so obsessed with these things; I just am ;). The new version pulls in the syntax highlighter from the articles section, so now you can pick a language and make the code look all pretty. In testing, I noticed that the Perl highlighter actually makes all of the Perl keywords into links to the appropriate Perldoc. If there's a language you would like to paste in but can't, do e-mail me; the system supports several dozen languages but I only but a selection in the pulldown for usability. As for communication languages, like English, I'm going to get to adding an option for that too soon. Also on the features plan is a way to let you edit/remove pastes using a throwaway password. This all of course depends on my finding time to dedicate to the site :)

Happy using, and once again mad props to Geshi!

Assorted Fixes

Gavin Olson - 1/8/2008 5:18

There were a number of issues that I somehow managed to not notice when I changed to Debian from Gentoo. The most major was that gavserver.com loaded the template file rather than the main page! That's all fixed now, in addition to a few other database and PHP issues. I'm still not entirely sure where PHP is getting the include_path environment variable, but I got the path to GeSHi added to it so I'm happy for now. As always, any issues that crop up with the site can be sent to me at gtolon@comcast.net

XHTML 1.1

Gavin Olson - 3/7/2007 0:16

The very observant will note that the little W3C icon at the bottom of the page has changed. This is because I got very motivated yesterday and got everything up to the newer specification. Gone are all the pretty deprecated <center> tags, replaced instead with the kludge "margin: 0 auto;" in the style of every block element in need of centering. Minor oversight to not have a horizontal alignment property that applies to children other than text, if you ask me. Other change was that apparently <input> tags can't be bare in a <form> block anymore; they need another layer of <div> or something similar. Seems dumb, <form> would appear to be the logical container for form fields. Anyway, the site is shinily compatible with the non-existant lightweight XHTML 1.1 user agent, and I am sated. Maybe one of these days I'll work on the parts of the site that actually matter, like the two unfinished zones or the barely started article on MVC.