Just posted a new SkyGuy.com video. This one is about the solstice. It is also the first time I have received a question from a cat.
I guess there is a first for everything.
I’m pretty happy with the video. The green screen could be a little sharper, and I spent too much time trying to cover two topics at once: what is the solstice and what causes the seasons. I finally opted to stop trying to answer that second question. I’ll put that in a later video.
I hacked together a Perl script that deletes all the old calendar entries in iCal. Users of iCal may have noticed by now that the latest version is bad and doesn’t actually allow you to delete anything prior to a certain date. As a result, the performance of iCal is …. uhm … disastrous.
Post a comment here with your email, and I’ll send it your way.
I am really trying to keep the momentum. I’ve started to publicize SkyGuy.com, so I can’t start falling behind on content.
“How Many Stars Are There” is, I think, pretty funny. Let me know what you think!
I’ve been kinda spoiled. Here in Colorado, we often get a chance to see the ISS and the space shuttle fly over when the shuttle separates from the station.
This time, however … no such luck 
Oh, well. Like I said, kinda spoiled.
However, when I get up there, and I am in whatever craft has separated from the station, it better be viewable from my home of Colorado so I can wave as I head home!
Of course the big news today is the new iPhone. But for me, the most interesting is the SDK for building fully native applications for the iPhone.
The possibilities for astronomy applications are making me drool…
Whew. Digital video (specifically, HD video) is a lot of work and a lot of waiting around.
I got kinda tired of that, so I thought “Y’know …. at this point, I’m just posting video to the web. I could get away with standard definition video (or even lower resolution).”
Well, I tried it. Standard definition video produces truly horrible green screen. Overall it looks unimpressive when finally encoded for the web.
I’m not thrilled with the amount of time HD takes, but I do love the results (especially now that I have compared them to what I would have gotten from standard definition DV).
This stuff takes way too long. Between the shooting, the editing (all in HD), converting, uploading, figuring out the way to make my blip.tv player look and behave the way I want, getting that player onto my site, etc — it’s all a bit much.
But I’m getting there …
I finally have the first video up on SkyGuy.com. It is also on Blip.tv.
I’m not happy with the encoding. I think I will re-upload the file to blip.tv to make a better version. I find that this one pauses in mid-stream. Blip tends to have substantially better quality than that.
What I did was upload to blip a .flv file. From now on, I think I’ll upload QuickTime and let blip convert it.
This is the 21st century. You would think making a calendar program wouldn’t be such a big deal.
Yet, with Leopard, Apple has clearly dropped the ball.
My wife got a new MacBook Pro some months back. One of my favorite things about Apple computers is “Migration Assistant.” You plug your old Mac into the firewire port of the new Mac, and it copies over all your applications, preferences, documents, photos, etc. It’s great.
However, while doing that, the Migration Assistant choked on my wife’s iCal file. I don’t remember the error, but it was clear it had problems copying over. When everything was done, I simply exported her old calendar data and imported it on the new Leopard laptop.
I thought that was the end of it. However, a new problem crept up: any time my wife quit iCal, and launched it again, the calendar was completely empty!
That wasn’t good. But I finally found a way to beat iCal into submission and get it working.
New problem: iCal began to get sluggish. Actually, that’s probably a huge understatement. It could take more than 30 seconds for my wife to get a response from iCal if she simply clicked to display the previous month. Another problem: exporting became impossible.
Today I had a chance to take a closer look. Her iCal files amounted to about 18 megabytes in size. That’s obviously pretty large for what is simply plain text. However, it’s not what we today would consider enormous. She had all her calendar data going back to 2005 in there.
It would be great to just delete all the old events, since they’re not needed. I found some suggestions on Google searches to simply open preferences, click on advanced, and check “delete events older than XX days” with the understanding that, when I next launched iCal, it would dutifully delete those old events.
No such luck.
Finally, I exported everything (which, of course, took forever) and imported the calendar data into Sunbird. The import took quite a while (nearly half an hour).
Sunbird is certainly a better calendar than iCal, but check this out: I can find no way to delete events in Sunbird, either!
This, on top of all the other stupid things Apple did to make iCal worse than it was in Tiger, leaves me wondering: What is the big deal with making a freakin’ calendar application in this day and age?!
It is Monday, and my server has been completely inaccessible since Saturday night. So here I am at BlueHost. I’ve used them before, and I have always been happy with their support.
It’s unfortunate that ThePlanet had the crisis they are dealing with, but I have been thinking of moving to a new, less expensive service anyway.
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