It seems that xmkmf is no longer available on Snow Leopard, which makes sense given that it's part of the deprecated imake package. Unfortunately, there's stuff out there that still needs it. I was trying to install x3270 on my Mac because I'm extremely intrigued by MVS/380 and I would need a 3270 emulator for it.
For whatever reason, fink doesn't have a x3270 package, but MacPorts does. When trying to install it from MacPorts, though, it errored out with configure: error: 'Cannot find xmkmf' .
Equipment: Celestron AstroMaster 76 EQ, Orion Skyview 6 Deluxe EQ, 32mm, 15mm, 10mm, 9mm eyepieces.
New objects observed: Mercury, M60, M86, M84, M58, M104, M5
Previous objects observed: M87
Notes: An excellent night with good transparency and seeing, which has been quite the rarity around these parts for the last six months or so.
To start off the night, at late evening I walked down to the corner with the Astromaster (easier to carry) to try and get Mercury.
Over at Daily Kos, Markos did a write-up of his experiences with his iPad and using it as a laptop replacement during a trip to DC. The reaction has, fairly predictably, been pretty strong.
I'm torn on the issue. I'm acutely aware of the concerns with Apple not letting the iPhone and iPad be more open, but on the other hand they're amazing pieces of hardware and software. I still haven't made a decision on the iPad, but I've had one iPhone or another for quite a while now, and I love my iPhone.
Equipment: Orion Skyview 6 Deluxe EQ, using the 32, 15, 9, 6, and 4 mm eyepieces.
New objects observed: NGC 2264, NGC 2244, M106
Notes:
I put off logging this night, and thought I had made notes of the exact day I had gone out, but it seems that I didn't or lost them and I don't remember exactly which day I went out. It was in any case around these days.
I've got some Macs these days, but I'm still a vi kind of guy. It's what I do pretty much all my work in, as far as work that involves editing text goes. It had always driven me a little crazy, though, that when I was using vi in iTerm (which is an excellent terminal emulator for Mac OS X - I highly recommend it), if I copied text from elsewhere and pasted it in, if you pasted in a line that went over the width of the terminal, it would break the long line up into many little lines and generally never worked right.
While I was setting up my new Mac and futzing about with it in general, I stuck in a USB flash drive that had been formatted with ext3. Needless to say it didn't mount it or anything, and I removed it shortly after. I then noticed that if I moused over the notifier area in the upper right corner of the screen (where the date, volume, Time Machine, etc. controls are), the Spinning Rainbow Ball of Doom showed up.
I upgraded the kernel on my Xen box (running Debian 5.0 "lenny") to 2.6.33 last week and came across a curious issue. With recent versions of the Linux kernel (versions that seem to be affected: 2.6.31, 2.6.32, and 2.6.33), changes in /proc have broken the nfs-kernel-server init scripts. Despite having NFS server support in the kernel as a module that's been properly loaded, the script dies with Not starting NFS kernel daemon: no support in current kernel.
Equipment: Orion Skyview 6 Deluxe EQ, using the 32, 15, 9, 6, and 4 mm eyepieces.
New objects observed: M46, M47, M50
Notes:
Not much to say here (which is part of the reason I'm only writing this up now). There was an unexpected gap in the clouds the night of the 8th, so I decided to run out back briefly and try to knock out some of the Messier objects visible in the vague neighborhood of Sirius.
Equipment: Orion Skyview 6 Deluxe EQ, using the 32, 25, 15, 10, and 4 mm eyepieces.
New objects observed: M51, M64, M87, M49
Previous objects observed: M81, M82, M53, Saturn, Titan
Notes:
Pretty good night. Very productive, given the four new galaxies, although the north still showed a lot of washing out from the lights of downtown Tacoma and the Port, which is usually a sign of some transparency issues. I also set up the viewing shelter, though, and wore an eyepatch for a while before hand, so that may have helped.
Equipment: Orion Skyview 6 Deluxe EQ, using the 32, 25, 10, 6, and 4 mm eyepieces, and the 2x Barlow with the 6mm.
New objects observed: M3, M53
Previous objects observed: M81, M82, Mars, Saturn, M94
Notes:
Probably the last good night for a while. Weather's supposed to turn cloudy again, and the moon's rising later and waxing anyway.
M81 & M82 weren't particularly bright, but they were visible. Found M94 again without too much trouble, but while I spent a good fair while trying to chase down other galaxies, I didn't have any luck.