Look, Up in the Sky!

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I trotted down to the Capitol Reflecting Pool at 9:30pm last night to catch the space station flyby. Unfortunately, a mischievous cumulus cloud happened to obscure Jupiter at the moment of closest contact, but the station came zooming out from behind the cloud, a brilliant point of light crossing from southwest to northeast in the span of about a minute.

At the same time, I was on my cellphone with Amy as she watched the same scene from atop her roof in Baltimore, 40 miles north. At the point that the station, low in the horizon, was on a horizontal level with Sirius, she reported that it was a few degrees above, and that it reached the level of Sirius only seconds later. Parallax in action.

On Spaceweather, someone has a GIF animation of the station passing by Jupiter. Good thing they didn’t collide. ;)

Beepy-Beepy

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Whew. The old folly has been rectified, and the photolog is now officially back to the state I left it in as of March 2003 (when I got lazy, then forgot to dump the DB info with its stupid naming convention while reinstalling MT). Over the last few weeks, I’ve been painstakingly rebuilding the log from scratch, picture by picture, and I finished the last picture at midnight last night. So I present you with BPBP. (Update, 07/04: BPBP has been dissolved and integrated into the main flow.)

Next step: a buffer of about seventy Zire photos to add and caption. Then some daily archives. Then the mobile part. And comments. And thumbnails. And fixing old links to now-dead photolog archive pages. Much yet.

I’ve also got a little cronjob getting my del.icio.us links every 13th minute of the hour, and feeding them to the sidebar. So now I have what could probably be termed a “sideblog.” (Who would have thought that using crontab to run PHP scripts would be so nonintuitive? lynx -dump?!)

Blogger’04

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The new Blogger.com is out, and it looks great, both visually and functionally. It’ll take a while to get used to not seeing the old black layout, but on the plus side, the new dashboard is clean and simple, and the public profiling brings the community/social network aspect of the system into sharp focus. The new features look extremely promising: so much so, in fact, that I think I will use Blogger.com for my moblog, a step I had not seriously considered since the BloggerBot stopped working. Setting up an email-to-post-based weblog on Blogger will certainly be easier than on Movabletype.

(I’ll update details, feedback, and insider info I see as I go along, but it’s almost 2am, and after all the hiking and skating my feet hurt, so I’m going to bed.)

Happy Trails

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This was an outdoorsy weekend. On Saturday, Amy and I headed up to Rock Creek Park to do a 2.5 mile hiking loop. Starting from the Van Ness Metro, we got on the Soapstone Valley Trail (the start of which turned out to be fairly well hidden a couple of blocks down Albemarle Street from Connecticut Ave), which gave us a few challenging bits, including a jump over the creek as it babbled over soapstone ledges, and a fallen tree which the Park Service had not yet chainsawed through. At the end of this trail, it joins with Beach Drive, on whose narrow shoulder one must walk for a few meters before arriving at the Western Ridge Trail, a backbone biking trail down which one may connect to grassy picnic areas and the Melvin Hazen Trail. From there, we walked over to the National Zoo to look at nautiluses and kangaroos, then capped off the day with a sunset dinner of rogan josh and shrimp vindaloo at Woodley Park.

Sunday after church, I broke out the rollerblades and skated down the Mall, across Memorial Bridge into VA, and down the Mount Vernon Bike Trail to Gravelly Point. That’s a park just a few hundred meters from the northern tip of National Airport’s runway, so that landing planes are practically in your hair. If you don’t mind the deafening scream of jets flying overhead every five minutes, it’s a great place for planespotting, soccer, fishing, and just lounging, which is what I did, catching the sun with a book and some rice crackers. Next time, I should bring an Airliners.net Info printout so I can tell the Airbuses from the Boeings.

, , N-G-O!

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Mind your <b>‘s and <i>‘s. In a “semantic” frenzy, I once made the mistake of converting all my b and i tags to strong and em, even for non-emphasized words which should rather have been enclosed in dfn, cite, address, var, code, samp, kbd, or blockquote. That’s what the “semantic” is all about. Sure, it’s a few more tags to keep track of, but they’ll be directly related to the meaning of the tagged text, and can be styled accordingly.

blockquote is a bit confusing about that, as Andrei Herasimchuk rants. The blockquote tag is not a true block-level element on its own, but a container tag into which elements such as paragraphs (enclosed in p tags) should be inserted. MovableType (at least, the version that I’m using at this writing) is annoyingly quirky over that when in “Convert Line Breaks” mode, putting p tags around single-line blockquote tags. When incorporating blockquote into an entry, I need to turn off Text Formatting and do my paragraphs manually. I’m hoping the MT team can fix that in the upcoming 3.x version. (No, I’d rather not use a plugin.)

Martian Color

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Meanwhile, on Mars, the Opportunity rover has reached Endurance Crater after days of travelling across the sandy plains of an ancient seabed. NASA/JPL has been absolutely awesome about releasing downloaded mission images from Mars to the public, and I’ve been eagerly watching the latest Navcam and Pancam archives for new photos.

The rover’s Pancam (panoramic camera) uses filters for blue, green, red, and infrared wavelengths, so images taken with each filter can be spliced and combined right at home, with a channel-based imaging application such as Photoshop, to produce approximate true-color images like this beauty. It’s harder than simply cutting and pasting each B/W filtered image into the R, G, and B channels, however: as discussed here on the BABB (Badastronomy.com bulletin board), only the left camera uses visible light wavelengths, and exposure times vary for each image, which can throw off the “true” color of the combined channels. More technical info on the Pancam here.

Keith Laney, digital imaging specialist for the mission, explains color balancing methods in great detail, and offers up some beautiful color Martian landscapes from Spirit and Opportunity. (Lots of photos; have a fast connection.)