BenSinclair.com

Nashville is the star of our bigsight city pages!

We’ve been working on city pages at bigsight that pull together profiles and aggregate content. So far Nashville is the star, thanks to Dan and his giant circle of Nashville friends.

Here we have profiles, news from Nashville papers and tv stations, news from user’s blogs, events, hot spots, and some interesting groupings. We can instantly build a page like this for any city. Cool stuff!

Testing bigsight maps

You can now embed your bigsight migration map into a blog or any other web page:

Cool!

MacBook Air

(Pictured: Macintosh Portable, PowerBook G4, MacBook Air)

When it comes to the Macbook Air, some people hate it, some people love it, and most people have no idea what they’re talking about.

The Air is a normal person’s computer. It’s not for your 300GB collection of movies you got off bittorrent. It’s not for “road warriors” who for some reason have jobs that force them to recalculate giant spreadsheets, edit digital video, recompile Firefox, and play Windows Solitaire all at the same time for 4.9 hours of a 5 hour flight.

I prefer to relax with a book and some cheap airline scotch while riding in a pressurized tube at 30,000 feet. I also prefer the Air to my old PowerBook.

The 80GB Air has a 1.6Ghz Core 2 Duo. It’s the slowest Macintosh you can buy. It’s also really fast. I bought it for working on my Rails apps at home. I can work for a little over 3 hours at a time before recharging. Of course, when am I never in range of an outlet? I don’t like to work at the beach.

If you want to do all of those weird things, Apple just happens to have a complete lineup of laptops with replaceable batteries, huge amounts of storage, and optical drives. Just buy one of those instead.

So anyway, the Air is a great machine. I love the keyboard, the screen is really, really bright, the battery lasts long enough for me, and I haven’t missed the optical drive. I used the drive sharing once to install the OSX developer tools. Remember when the iMac lost its floppy drive? It’s the same deal. It’s even easier to copy stuff over the network these days.

Did you notice that the Air is really, really thin? You don’t notice how nice it is until you carry one around. I’m using it with my PowerBook bag, and I can fit a lot more in there now! While thin, the Air is not too small to have a tiny keyboard and screen. It’s just about the perfect size.

This is what I think of some of the problems people have with the Air:

It only has one USB port! What are you really carrying around that you need all of those USB ports for? If you’re carrying five USB devices, you can carry a hub. Seriously, what are you plugging into this thing?

It’s too big/too small! No, it’s not.

You can’t swap batteries! Yeah, because I’ve ever owned more than one battery for all of the laptops I’ve ever had.

The drive is too small! It’s not big, but I’m not using it as an iPod. My apps aren’t huge either. They’ll come up with bigger, tiny drives. Just wait a bit.

It’s too expensive! Buy a $600 Dell. It has more USB ports anyway.

No optical drive! No, I can’t install Office while on a plane. I really never use the optical drive on my PowerBook. I watched a DVD once, I guess.

No ethernet jack! Stay at a better hotel.

So, there are my rambling thoughts on the Air.

I made TechCrunch!

Dan and I created an application that lets you export your Facebook data to CSV, and it made it to TechCrunch!

Check it out!

What I'm Looking Forward to in OSX Leopard

Items copy and pasted from the Leopard feature list:

Scripting Bridge for Objective-C

Query and control applications with integrated AppleScript support using other languages such as Ruby, Python, and Objective-C — thanks to the new Scripting Bridge architecture.

Copy Files Between Mac OS X and Windows

Copy, open, modify, or delete files in Mac OS X that you saved to your Windows partition. Leopard understands the Windows FAT32 disk format.

New Look

Enjoy an elegant, distinctive new look across the entire system. The semitransparent menu bar and reflective Dock frame your desktop picture. The active application window stands out with a deeper drop shadow and a distinctive toolbar color. One look at Leopard and you’ll know you’re in for something special.

Stacks

Organize files in a neat stack on the Dock. One click and the stack springs open, revealing items in an elegant arc or an at-a-glance grid.

New User Interface for Preview

Enjoy powerful new features wrapped in a simple and elegant user interface — striking the perfect balance between simplicity and capability.

PDF Manipulation in Preview

Re-create your PDF as you like. Move individual pages around, or remove pages altogether. You can even combine PDFs with a simple drag and drop.

Spaces

Organize your activities into separate spaces and easily switch from one to another. Make a space for work or play. Choose from a number of convenient options that make moving from space to space fast and easy.

Calculations in Spotlight

Find answers fast. Just activate Spotlight and type in a simple or sophisticated equation, and Spotlight will instantly show you the result. Enjoy support for over 40 functions ranging from simple math to logarithms to trigonometry.

Hot Corner for Sleep Display

Get more use out of those hot corners. In addition to launching Exposé or starting a screen saver, you can now use hot corners to put your display to sleep.

Tabbed Windows

Keep multiple Terminal sessions going in a single, tabbed window.

Cocoa Bridges

Use Ruby and Python as first-class languages for building Cocoa applications, thanks to Objective-C bridges as well as full Xcode and Interface Builder support.

Ruby on Rails

Work in a developer’s dreamland. Leopard is the perfect platform for Ruby on Rails development, with Rails, Mongrel, and Capistrano built in.

Iowa Star Party Notes

My camp at the Iowa Star Party

September 7th, 2007

The weather was perfect, crystal clear and really, really dark. The best skies I’ve ever seen in Iowa. The Milky Way was amazing, with lots of structure. Everything showed lots of contrast.

I did most of my observing with my 12” dob and 26mm Orion Q70 eyepiece.

I checked out Jupiter first. Three moons were visible as the sky darkened, then four is it grew darker. An Iridium flare occurred shortly after sunset, brightening and fading slowly as it moved down from near Polaris.

M81 and M82 were clearly visible in the same field, with good structure details on M82.

M51 was a little dim, but I could plainly see the whirlpool structure and companion galaxy.

Since it was so dark, I tried the Veil Nebula, which I’ve never seen before. I could just see part of the larger side in my 26mm, and it had good contrast. I switched to my 32mm and put in an O3 filter and it really popped. The other side was amazing with its bright star and gentle curving wisp of nebula.

I also looked at the North American Nebula, but even at my lowest power (46x) it was too large to get a really good view. A nearby refractor with a giant Nagler eyepiece showed it better, with great contrast.

M27 was great, with excellent detail and contrast.

M13 was better than I’d ever seen, with clearly resolved stars all the way to its core.

September 8th, 2007

I spent most of the day sitting in the sun waiting for it to get dark, reading from Guns, Germs, and Steel. The banquet dinner was excellent, with pork chops, scalloped potatoes, cucumber salad, green beans, bread, and brownies. We ate outside at the River House in excellent weather.

The presentation by Dr. Kawaler was very interesting. He discussed current and future methods of detecting exoplanets in the habitable zone, and his work on the upcoming Kepler mission. He also told us of an exciting discovery coming out on Wednesday, but apparently we can’t talk about it yet!

He claimed to remember me from Astro 250 in 2001, but he may have been humoring me.

We went back to the star field shortly after dark. The forecast called for partly cloudy, then mostly cloudy at midnight, followed by a 20% chance of thunderstorms.

I observed a few targets, including Herschel’s Garnet Star, which happens to be yellow. The clouds soon moved in and I packed everything up.

Spock Calculates his Ground Speed

Did you know Spock used an E6B flight computer? My E6B doesn’t seem to have a scale for warp speeds.

It’s a Jeppesen even!

Iowa Star Party

I’ll be attending the Iowa Star Party this weekend. It’s a yearly gathering of Iowa amateur astronomers organized by the Amea Area Amateur Astronomers. If it’s anything like last year it will consist of grumpy Ames astronomers, some people from my astronomy group, and Dave Oesper. He’s not grumpy and runs a great web site!

Also like last year it will probably be cloudy. Garst Farms no longer does their awesome breakfast at the farm house, so I’ll be camping out in the star field.

Garmin Releases MapSource for OSX... Or does it?

The Garmin blog says they now have a native MapSource for OSX. Unfortunately it seems like it only works with automotive units, not handhelds, and even then doesn’t work very well.

I’ll try it out soon and see what happens, but for now running Windows MapSource in Parallels seems to be the best bet.

First Solo Flight!

I made my first solo flight today! I did three touch and goes after going around a few times with my instructor. He suddenly hopped out of the plane and off I went!

Me with Skyhawk 80135 after parking:

My logbook entry: