Jupiter and the Moon dominate the sky

For the next few evenings Jupiter and the Moon put on a show as they brighten up the southern sky. Jupiter is in Capricornus moving gradually eastward across the constellation. The Moon, just past first quarter phase, is also speeding across Capricornus and will appear very near to Jupiter on Monday evening October 26th.

Jupiter will remain a brilliant light high in the southern sky for the remainder of 2009. I enjoy the close-up view of the planet through a telescope or binoculars because you can see the four Galilean satellites, moons that are big enough to see with just 10 or 20x magnification, moons that move so quickly that you can detect the change of position of the four Galilean moons with respect to each other in just one evening of watching.

The Urban Astronomer LIVE!

I recorded a few videos of myself talking about star parties, what to see in the night sky, how to use a telescope, and more. They are short and to the point. I haven't done a lot with video up until now, but I think it will be a nice way to share some basics on observing and astronomy. So if you have a few minutes to spare, click here for the Urban Astronomer LIVE!

Get Involved: Galilean Nights Star Parties in San Francisco

As part of the ongoing International Year of Astronomy (IYA), this weekend, October 23-25, is being hailed "Galilean Nights" in honor of the Italian scientist who used a telescope to open a new era of understanding of the heavens. Astronomy clubs around the world are hosting star parties and inviting the public to take part.

The San Francisco Amateur Astronomers (SFAA) will hold two star parties on Saturday October 24th, one in the city of San Francisco and one at Mount Tamalpais in Marin County. I have often blogged about the SFAA events on Mt. Tam, where there are great lectures by professional astronomers and scientists as well as star gazing through amateur and professional telescopes. This month the lecture is at 7:00 pm with Professor Michael Dine of UCSC. I love to attend these events and share the night sky with attendees. This month, however, I'll be at the "City Star Party" (weather permitting) at Lands End in San Francisco. This event will start at 6:30 pm at the end of El Camino del Mar just off Point Lobos above the Sutro Baths ruins.

If you don't live near San Francisco or Marin, you can check out the Galilean Nights website for details of an event near you. See you under the stars.

Galileo's Findings 400 Year Ago: KALW Broadcast

I was a guest on the Crosscurrents Program on KALW Radio (91.7 FM in San Francisco) today talking about Galileo.

Listen in and learn a few things about the his discoveries, fundamental concepts that changed our understanding of the world around us. This is what the International Year of Astronomy (IYA) is all about.

How To Open VirtualBox Guest OS Directly

Opening guest OS in VirtualBox requires an extra click. You have to open VirtualBox OSE from Accessories and click start to run guest OS.

Instead of this you can create a launcher to directly open VirtualBox guest OS.
So just a single click and your guest OS will start running.

The backend for this is powerful VBoxManage CLI command. It can do lot more than the GUI can do. For example check how to hide menubar and statusbar in VirtualBox.

Now to open guest OS directly from panel do the following. I'll assume your guest OS name as "guestos1"

1. Right click empty area in panel and choose Add to Panel
2. Select Custom Application Launcher (its on top)
3. Fill the dialog box it brings as:
   
   
   • Type: application
   • Name: guestos1
   • Command: VBoxManage startvm "guestos1"
   • Comment:  Start guest os names "guestos1"
     
   
   
4. Click the icon and choose icon of your choise
5. Click OK.

Now your launcher is ready to open guest os directly.

Planetary Motion

The morning sky continues to be a busy place, showcasing just how much action is taking place in the Solar System. Saturn, a relatively slow moving outer planet is gradually rising up in the east, emerging each morning a minute or two earlier so that it will soon be a true morning star. As it graces the dawn sky just ahead of the sunrise, it is encountering the two fast-moving inner planets, Venus and Mercury. This week they have close encounters and beautiful alignments that will be a sight to see. The illustrations provide a sense of how far Venus and Mercury move over the course of just a few days. The passing of the waning Moon on the mornings of the 15th and 16th add a nice touch to an already impressive lineup of Solar System objects.

Beautiful Karmic Koala Desktop

OS: Ubuntu Karmic Koala Beta
Theme: Nightly Impression with Conky

Beautiful Horizontal Conky

In the desktop above you can see the horizontal conky at the bottom of the desktop. Following is the configuration file .conkyrc from which you can achieve this.

#avoid flicker
double_buffer yes


#own window to run simultanious 2 or more conkys
own_window  yes
own_window_transparent yes
own_window_type override
own_window_hints undecorate,sticky,skip_taskbar,skip_pager


#borders
draw_borders no
border_margin 1


#shades
draw_shades no


#position
gap_x 0
gap_y 1
alignment bottom_left


#behaviour
update_interval 5


#colour
#default_color  8f8f8f
default_color    e0e0e0
#default_shade_color 000000
own_window_colour 262729


#font
use_xft yes
xftfont sans:size=9


# Force UTF8? note that UTF8 support required XFT
override_utf8_locale yes


#to prevent window from moving
use_spacer none
minimum_size 1200 0


TEXT
${alignc}${color}Kernel:${color e0e0e0}$kernel${color 000000} | ${color}Uptime:${color e0e0e0}${uptime_short}${color 000000} | ${color}Cpu1:${color e0e0e0}${cpu cpu1}%${color 000000} | ${color}Cpu2:${color e0e0e0}${cpu cpu2}%${color 000000} | ${color}Ram:${color e0e0e0}${memperc}%${color}${color 000000} | ${color}Swap:${color e0e0e0}${swapperc}%${color}${color 000000} | ${color}Root:${color e0e0e0}${fs_used_perc /}%${color 000000} | ${color}Home:${color e0e0e0}${fs_used_perc /home}%${if_existing /proc/net/route wlan0}${color 000000} | ${color}Signal:${color e0e0e0}${wireless_link_qual wlan0}%${color 000000} | ${color}Up:${color e0e0e0}${upspeed wlan0}kb/s${color}/Down:${color e0e0e0}${downspeed wlan0}kb/s${color}${else}${if_existing /proc/net/route eth0}${color 000000} | ${color}eth0:${color e0e0e0}${downspeed eth0}/${upspeed eth0} kb/s${color}${endif}${else}Network Unavailable${endif}${color 000000} | ${color}DiskIO:${diskio}${alignc}

You can optimize this file by decent use of ${color} variable. I messed this up as I am lazy and quite busy.


If you are new to conky, I'll write a short instruction on how to achieve this.

1. Install conky by clicking here or by opening terminal and typing sudo aptitude install conky or from add/remove program or from synaptic package manager.
2. Create a file with name .conkyrc and copy the content from top and save it in your homefolder.
3. Now press Alt+F2 and type conky
4. You'll see the bar at the bottom of your screen.
5. You can change the update_interval 5 to smaller number. Actually you can change everything to suit your needs. You can look for more .conkyrc  file or read conky manual by doing man conky.
6. Put it in Syste/Preferences/Startup Application to make it start on every boot.

[Solved] couldn't open demos/TUTORIAL.dm_68

I usually don't play games. This festival season with long vacation we group of guys decided to play some FPS games. As me being the LAN party organizer I was busy checking few games. I checked Unreal Tournament*, Urban Terror, Assault Cube and America's Army.

Urban Terror is a free multiplayer first person shooter developed by FrozenSand, that (thanks to the ioquake3-code) does not require Quake III Arena anymore. It is available for Windows, Linux and Macintosh. The current version is 4.1.

Yes Urban Terror supports both 32 bit and 64 and Linux, Mac and Windows.

To check Urban Terror, first I had to add some bots. Adding bot isn't officially supported but is very easy.

• Goto console by pressing ~ key 
• /bot_enable 1 to enable bots 
• /reload if you have already started the server 
• /addbot chicken to add bot named chicken or /addbot puma to add puma, here is more bots. 

The bots were very difficult for me so I decided to check demo. I couldn't open the demo and got error " couldn't open demos/TUTORIAL.dm_68". I checked the path and file and both exists.

After googling the solution was to convert the demo filename from small caps to upper caps.
Thats it and the demo will run.

*I had to download Unreal Tournament from linux.softpedia.com because the archive I downloaded from unrealtournament2003.com was corrupted.

Morning Spectacle

Three planets make a nice showing in the early hours of the morning this week, with Mercury and Saturn having a close encounter. Autumn mornings are particularly interesting here in San Francisco because the weather is generally more reliable and the first light of dawn comes so late in the morning -- right now around 6:45 am with sunrise around 7:15 am. The view in the image shows what you can expect to see this week as Saturn and fast-changing Mercury line up on Thursday morning October 8th. All of this will stand in stark contrast to bright Venus, the brilliant beacon dominating the eastern sky in the morning.

Later this week there will be another amazing event in the morning sky. Stay tuned!