• The Author – Bart Busschots

  

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I just spent the last 10 minutes picking someone’s used chewing gum out of the power connector on my MBP with a small key. I can only imagine it picked up its sticky and rather unpleasant cargo when I slid it into the seat pocket on the plane for landing. There really are some very disgusting and inconsiderate prats on this planet.

As I write this I’m on holidays in Belgium with my family and I’ve made it my business to find out as much as I can about both the current political crisis in Belgium and the long history behind this crisis reaching right back to the formation of Belgium in 1830. Ultimately the big question has to be whether or not we are seeing the beginning of the end of Belgium, at least as we know it. Although I did most of my growing up in Ireland and consider myself to be Irish in many ways, I was not born either in Ireland of from even one Irish parent. Instead I was born in Belgium from two Belgian parents, or, to be more precise, in Flanders from two Flemish parents. It’s important that you know this because despite my best efforts some Flemish bias will probably creep into this article.

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In general the move to Leopard has been very smooth for me but there was one notable exception, getting a working PostgreSQL 8 sever up and running on my MacBookPro. A few weeks ago I’d expended a lot of time and effort on this and gotten nowhere so at that stage I’d decided to work around the problem by using a remote PostgreSQL server rather than running one locally. This works fine as long as you have broadband internet access. However, I’m off to Belgium for a week on Saturday where I’ll have no broadband but where I will need to get some development work done that requires access to a PostgerSQL server.

With the end of the week getting closer I had another go at getting PosgreSQL to behave on OS X and I did eventually succeed. I got 90% of the way there by following these instructions but then I ran into a few strange problem that took a little more time and effort to work around. However, the good news is that I got it all figured out in the end!

[tags]PostgreSQL, OS X, OS X 10.5 Leopard[/tags]

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Tagged with: PostgreSQL • databases • OS X

I’ve commented before about how much I like the new more open JKR we’ve gotten to see since the release of the last Harry Potter book last summer. Today I got my best taste yet of this liberated Joe on a special surprise episode of Potter Cast. Talk about a fantastic Christmas treat, without any advanced warning the entirety of episode 130 was given over to a long discussion about the books with JKR her self. What’s even better is that there’s a second part to come next week!

I’ve just finished listening now and it was fantastic. Very natural, very informative and very entertaining. It’s not your typical interview fodder, it sounds like a group of friends having a chat about Harry Potter only one of the friends happens to be the author herself!

If you’re a fan of the Potter books you really should have a listen to this episode, even if you wouldn’t usually listen to Harry Potter podcasts.

[tags]Potter Cast, JK Rowling[/tags]

Thanks to this nice wordpress plugin/theme from the guys at content robot this blog now displays even better on an iPhone or iPod Touch. It works by first providing a theme that is optimised for use on Mobile Safari and then adding a plugin that uses that theme automatically for just Mobile Safari. It’s a nice idea well implemented. (Thanks to Alison for the tip)

Tagged with: Wordpress • site news • web site

When I recently purchased a 30mm F1.4 fixed focus lens I explained my reasons for doing so while reviewing the lens. Today I realised I left out yet another reason to add a fast fixed-focus lens to your collection. Because fast lenses gather insane amounts of light you can shoot hand-held at night and actually get good results. I did manage to get some night time images before using the standard 18-55mm zoom that comes as part of the Nikon D40 kit, but that was really working at the limit (see the results here). Because that lens is quite slow at F3.5-5.6 I had to crank the ISO up to 1600 and even then the exposure times were still very high. This resulted in images that were grainy and a lot had to be junked because they were blurred to a greater or lesser extent.

On my way home from work this evening I had a go at some night time photography with my new F1.4 lens. It was such a nice experience! With the ISO turned down to 800 I could easily take hand held shots that look pretty good.

You can see the results of my work in this gallery.

Tagged with: hardware • lens • review • astrophotography

While making my way through my RSS feeds this lunch time I came across a very well written but very disturbing article entitled Rigged by George Monbiot. It basically makes a mockery of the current attempts by governments to deal with climate change. On the one hand they talk about the need to cut carbon and tell us all to cut down and be more efficient but on the other hand they offer massive tax incentives to companies to encourage them to extract more fossil fuels. It doesn’t take a genius to realise that all fossil fuels that are extracted will be burned, hence the governments talk about reducing carbon but actually incentivise its increase! What really makes this article so damming is that the author backs up all his points with references. The way this article is referenced it could be published in an academic journal. Anyhow, as Fake Steve Jobs would put it, here’s the money quote:

The government’s climate change policy works like this: extract every last drop of fossil fuel then pray to God that no one uses it.

[tags]Climate Change, Fossil Fuels[/tags]

Sure, it may be the size of a fridge and have the computing power of a pocket calculator, but there are still things you can use DEC Alpha Server 2100’s for. For example, they make great Christmas Tree stands in systems departments 🙂

In one of my early Leopard posts I was happy to report that my Epson scanner was working perfectly. However, yesterday when I went to scan it wouldn’t work. It kept telling me there was an error communicating with the scanner. I checked the connections and all seemed normal. The only real change there has been on the system since the last time the scanner was used was the update to 10.5.1. I can only conclude that that’s what broke it.

Regardless of who is to blame I did eventually find a solution. First, go to the Epson site and download and install the latest drivers for your scanner, the description should explicitly say that it supports Leopard. Then reboot. It doesn’t tell you to but I couldn’t get the scanner back into life without a reboot. At this stage I found that the Epson Scan utility wouldn’t even launch. However, the TWAIN drivers themselves do work so you can scan using Preview.app. I’d never used Preview to scan before and I have to say I’m impressed with the interface. You can scan from within Preview by going to File -> Import Image ....

I have to say I’m a little disappointed with Apple over this, 10.5.1 was supposed to fix things, not break them!

[tags]Hardware, Scanner, Apple, OS X, Leopard, Epson[/tags]

Tagged with: operating system • hardware • OS X

Amazingly comet 17/P Holmes is still visible to the naked eye under good conditions. When it flared up way back in October no one dared predict it would remain visible for more than a week or two. The comet has changed a lot in appearance over the last month and a half though. It started out looking like a star and is not a massive and very diffuse blob which appears as big as, if not bigger than, the Moon. This new defuse character means that the comet is rendered invisible by any Moon light, haze or high cloud. Having said that I did manage to glimpse it last night from my back garden in Maynooth so it can stand a little light pollution when it is very high up in the sky (it was nearly over head when I observed it last night). I can’t imagine this fascinating comet will still be visible one Moon cycle from now so make the most of the next few days to grab it before the Moon comes in to spoil the fun again, and probably for good this time!

[tags]Comet, 17/p Holmes[/tags]

Tagged with: comet • observation log • astronomy

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