Charles and Christy’s Weblog

I’ve been really pleased with Thunderbird’s RSS reader. Having tried the Firefox reader, Feedonfeeds, and various standalone GUIs, this has been by far the most useful.

Probably largely because it is right there with the rest of my primary input, email. Also because it is uncomplicated and does what I want. All the others got to be annoying, some much more quickly than others.

For a good long while, I was using Feedonfeeds, but the MySQL backing was a bit complicated and I got tired of cron spam whenever my webserver was down for maintenance. The allure of having my feeds available online at anytime was kinda cool, but in the end not very compelling. Thunderbird is simply far easier to navigate, update, and manage.

I’m tempted to set up an LDAP server to get better address book integration. Anyone know a better way to tie Thunderbird into the rest of everything?

I’ve used some pretty cool astronomy software in the past, namely Starry Night Pro. The other day, I stumbled on to Celestia (GPL) and was immediately impressed.

This little program is all OpenGL. While its initial run right after download may seem “eh - ok” this puppy starts singing once you begin playing with various add-on features contributed by the user community.

Here’s my usage and add-on recommendations:

1. Grab the Earth Location File and plunk it in the extras folder.
2. Fire up the program. Run the demo from the Help menu to get a sense of its capabilities.
3. Run this tutorial script to try out some additional controls.
4. Turn on Label Features under Render -> Location. Find your hometown by rotating and zooming in.
5. In the Navigation menu, click Goto Object... and type your hometown as Earth/[hometown] as in Earth/Carrboro.
6. Rotate the Earth until you are more-or-less normal to your hometown.
7. Follow the directions to setup the “backyard planetarium” to simulate your view outside. (With the locations database add-on, you shouldn’t have to lookup your hometown’s coordinates.)
8. Add a bookmark for your current view in the Bookmarks menu.
9. To make the Earth look incredible, download a series of add-ons. They can be pretty huge - all in, about 900 MB.
   • JMII levels 0-4
   • JMII level 5
   • JNight
   • JNormal
   • earth-clouds

It doesn’t have as many bells and whistles as Starry Night Pro, but it’s darn good for Open Source software with a great supporting community.

Only complaints are that it has a lag as it’s loading texture files for an object you’re approaching. Really makes a convincing argument to get a wicked-fast video card!

I continue to be very pleased with WordPress and just completed the painless upgrade to v 1.5.

Looking forward to the more powerful comment-spam handling. Probably has additional hidden treasures.

Google has done it again, now with their maps. Don’t know exactly how they do it, but it is amazing. The rendering speed is blazing fast - an incredible technical feat.

Check out all the cool things you can do.

If only Britannica could implement something this cool for their maps! Would make the CD/DVD very nice indeed. Mmm how I miss the atlas project.

I recently came across an excellent summary of the state of free CMSs.

Most CMSs are:
* Over Complicated
* Under Documented
* Too Little Styling or Way Too Much Styling
* High Learning Curve
* Blogs or Slashdot Clones or Fancy Database Engines but not Content Management Systems for small to medium sites

Already disgusted with Plone, PHP-Nuke, Drupal, Mambo, and EZ, I'm next going to try:
* Textpattern
* Lenya
* Lodel
* Typo3
* phpwcms

Welcome to WordPress. I just installed this sucker to replace MovableType. You may have noticed that I've been getting deluged with blog-spam. So I needed to upgrade and it was time to switch to Free Software.

Only trick to install was that I had to edit import-mt.php to get my old blog entries.