Recording the partial eclipse on June 10th

A partial eclipse occurred here on Monday 10th of June so I endeavored to capture the event with some time lapsed photography. I made a flash movie of the results and detailed the making of it too.

Counting Shooting Stars

The Leonids Meteorite shower on November 19th was hyped to be a great show. Unfortunately it clashed with a almost full moon which prevented observers from seeing the fainter meteorites. I've had an interest in meteorite showers since the mid 90's when I watched the Perseids while staying on a farm near Macon in France. Last year I wrote a perl script to help me record and analyze the shower alas the script and data was lost in a hard disk crash. I wrote a new program this year, MeteoriteCount.pl which I used to collect this data. A group of us went to Inspiration point in the Berkeley hills to view the show. The shower was predicted to peak at 2.30am which was close to what we observed. The actual number of meteorites observed was very low but many were quite spectacular.

Many Changes

The site design is almost complete and I've started to add some content and functionality.
RSS feeds from a number of websites that I read daily have been syndicated to the Feed page. Using Blagg combined with miniBlog plus a few perl scripts and cron it all runs automatically in the background.
The laptop music page now has a new template and some content to help starting musicians. In a few weeks time I will be able to start composing music in earnest.
I've also ported a few mass spec perl scripts to the site and put them up on the BioMass page. I still need to design a fancy template for this part of the site but that should happen in a few weeks time. I have a number of programs in development that will also start to appear over the next few weeks.

First post on the website

Announcing miniBlog

I wanted some sort of weblog feed on the frontpage. A way to quickly add
new stories and automatically archive the old ones. I had a look around
for suitable tools but most were too fully featured for what I had in mind.
One that did almost fit the bill was Blosxom a small perl script from Rael Dornfest
at O'Reilly. As I wanted to do something slightly different I wrote my own script
based on some of those ideas which resulted in miniBlog!