Equipment: 6” Orion Skyview EQ, 32mm, 15mm, 6mm, 4mm eyepieces, OIII filter.
New object observed: NGC 6910
Previously viewed objects observed: Messier 29, Epsilon Lyrae, NGC 7331
New location: Rockaway Beach, OR.
Rockaway Beach is fairly dark, but unfortunately it was hazier and damper than I realized, which made it both more difficult to observe than I hoped it would be and brought a fairly early end to the night. I did try searching around for an observing spot that wasn’t so near the ocean that might be above some of this haze, but nothing has panned out yet.
Equipment: 16” Dobsonian, 55mm, 12mm TeleVue Nagler, 32mm, 6mm eyepieces, OIII filter.
New objects observed: Messier 107, Messier 23, Messier 24, Messier 109, Messier 108, Messier 55, NGC 2976, Messier 25, Messier 15, Messier 75, NGC 6946, NGC 6939
Previously viewed objects observed: Messier 8, NGC 6530, Messier 97, Messier 51, NGC 5195, Messier 13, Messier 92, Messier 81, Messier 82, NGC 3077, NGC 6960 (Western Veil Nebula), NGC 6995 (Eastern Veil Nebula), NGC 6974, Messier 31, Messier 32, Messier 110
Equipment: 16” Dobsonian telescope, 55mm and 12mm Tele Vue Nagler eyepieces.
“New” objects observed: Messier 10, Messier 12
Previously viewed objects observed: Messier 56
“New” is in quotes there because I’m pretty sure I’ve seen M10 and M12, but never bothered to make note of it. In any case, I made sure to look at them tonight, so two more off the Messier list for sure.
This was a surprisingly difficult night.
I totally spaced posting about this before, but back in February 2011 I did a talk at Ignite Seattle titled “Your Moral Panic About Triceratops is Wrong”.
The gist of it is that some researchers announced that they believed that Torosaurus was really a very mature Triceratops, and there was panic on the Internets about Triceratops not being a real dinosaur anymore. In the talk, I discuss why that isn’t so (hint: species names have a system of priorities) and why it’s different than Brontosaurus vs.
I’m really not sure how I missed out on some of this stuff for so long, but I just came across some MySQL tools from the fine folks at Percona that I’ve been digging into over the last couple of days. I’ve already gotten a lot of use out of the Percona toolkit stuff, particularly pt-query-advisor and pt-variable-advisor. I’m also looking very closely at their monitoring plugins; they already have plugins for nagios and cacti, and I’m curious if these plugins can be adapted for using with newrelic.
Back in late 2010, I built a very small split ring telescope. Split ring telescope examples are out there on the internet (and here’s another example), but they’re a lot bigger than the one I built. Building a split ring mount for a 3” telescope was both easier and more difficult than building a larger one, since on one hand I didn’t have to work with huge things, but on the other working on such a small scale meant I didn’t have a whole lot of room to work.
I noticed yesterday that all of the sudden, that little thing on the side that lists my github repos quit working. I updated my octopress sources to match the current master, but that failed to fix the problem.
Googling around a little, I saw that Github end-of-lifed v1 and v2 of their API yesterday, which promptly broke the Github repo thing in Octopress. Fortunately you can get the same general information from the new API, but it requires some code changes.
Linux on a S/390 or z/Machine is pretty similar to Linux running on any other architecture, but installing Chef on one is an interesting thought experiment. One major issue, though, is that binary packages are (not surprisingly) not built for s390 by Opscode, so you’ll have to do the more manual installation.
First, unless you have a mainframe laying around, set up a Linux/390 VM running under Hercules. I found these instructions to be useful, but since I’m on a Mac I had to make a few changes:
By default, an ActiveAdmin page, either show or index, will escape any HTML in a field that it displays. This is generally good behavior, but if you have an HTML field that’s supposed to have HTML in it, it will be displayed fully escaped, with the < and > tags mucking things up in all their glory. If you have a field that’s supposed to have HTML in it and you take care of cleaning and sanitizing it already (like on save), you can get around this feature like so.
I needed to add TinyMCE to a form for WYSIWYG editing (which is what it’s for, of course), so I put the jQuery TinyMCE thing in. Unfortunately, adding TinyMCE to the textarea broke the RSpec tests, complaining bitterly that
Selenium::WebDriver::Error::ElementNotVisibleError: Element is not currently visible and so may not be interacted with … which was no good at all.
Scouring around the internet showed a lot of people who had had similar problems, but nothing quite spelled it out.