A couple of days ago I was on the TWiT netcast show FLOSS Weekly talking about Stellarium. I was pretty nervous - the show was recorded in front of thousands of live streaming viewers and has a fairly big listenership as a podcast too. Not to mention that previous guests have included some pretty big names in the free / open source world, including Linus Torvalds himself!

I think I managed to babble somewhat coherently for most of the show, although there were a few pretty awkward moments including a total skype fail half way through. :-(

Anyhow, you can download the show here.

Stellarium 0.10.3 has finally been released (Windows + source for *nix... OSX binaries to follow).

This release includes my Satellites plugin by default (although you have to enable it manually). Also, the script console is included, although there are some known bugs still with the scripting engine (whoops!). I'm working on it... :-)

I checked the OpenStreetMap data for Haiti in general and Port-au-Prince in particular soon after I heard about the terrible earthquake of 12th Jan 2010. There was pretty much nothing there. This was not surprising considering the grinding poverty which is the reality of every day life for so many Haitians. Commercial maps also have little coverage of the country.

Today I found out something which made me proud to be an OSM contributor - since the disaster, various sources have published aerial imagery and OSMers have been busy converting this into the most detailed and useful map of the country which I can find on the web.

In just 48 hours the OSM map of Port-au-Prince has gone from almost nothing to the clearest, most detailed map of the city I can find. I am certain that this map help the coordination of the relief efforts and save many lives. Go OSM!

More on the Brain Off blog.

Yesterday one of the poorest nations on the planet, Haiti, suffered a terrible earthquake. What little infrastructure existed there before is now badly damaged and it looks certain that the situation is very severe.

Please consider making a donation to MSF (UK | global) or Oxfam (UK | global) to help with the relief effort.

Adorable porpoisehead art by Cloe. <3

Recently I've been doing a bit of web development. The goal is to make an attractive looking art portfolio / gallery site. To start with I looked at a couple of open source image gallery web apps like coppermine, gallery and so on.

I did some installs and they worked well as far as they went but the resulting experience always felt a bit sterile. These projects often allow for a lot of customisation, and I realise that making my own theme could do a lot to make the site look better. However the functionality of these projects is huge and complicated, and to be honest is massive overkill for a simple portfolio gallery. They don't feel right for the task.

Recently there seems to have been an increase in the number of people contacting me about Stellarium being sold - on auction sites or in one case as part of a package from a "name a star" business. My stance on this is that so long as the sellers abide by the terms of the GPL license, there's little reason to get upset about it.

It's legally OK for anyone to re-distribute Stellarium and charge a reasonable fee for such distribution, provided that the terms of the GPL are met - most importantly in my eyes that sourcecode is distributed as well as binaries (including all modified source), that copyrights are not modified in any way, and that derivative works are licensed under the GPL. Sellers are also not allowed to claim or imply that Stellarium is their own work.

Work continues apace on the "new" Stellarium script engine. As part of my work on this I found my workflow a little inefficient - switching between Stellarium and vim in a terminal all the time to edit scripts and then re-run them.

What better then, than to spend a little time making an integrated script editor tool inside Stellarium?

Since my last post here, there have been two minor releases of Stellarium. 0.10.1 was a bugfix release, and 0.10.2 followed the release of QT4.5, which fixed some problems on the Mac, improved performance somewhat and generally made life a little easier.

More exciting however, is the sudden increase in development of new features. For a while now I've been saying in project news items and here on porpoisehead.net that the years of re-structuring of Stellarium's code is going to make it a lot easier to develop new features. I realise that after the third time saying this that we better actually get round to developing some new features, else the user base will start to lose enthusiasm for the project. Well, it seems to be paying off.

Less than 5 weeks after release, Stellarium 0.10.0 has had just shy of a quarter of a million downloads. This number includes downloads for Windows, OSX and source code, and was gathered from both the sourceforge site statistics, and some of a more popular freeware software sites which redistribute the program.