*Sigh*. Once in a while I realise Richard Stallman is right. I really try to avoid adopting the seemingly pathlogical stance he takes on "all non-free software being anti-social and evil", and yes, sometimes this makes me feel dirty. My general approach is to try to be pragmatic, and embrace gestures from companies like Adobe (who have absobed Macromedia, the developers of Flashplayer) and Nvidia who, while "not getting" open source to the extent that they actually release their code, do seem to try to make a token effort to support Linux and the BSDs. Let's face it, it's a lot more than most companies bother doing.

Just when I think things are moving in the right direction, PFFT, things get worse again...

An old friend of mine, one Ian Hallam, is setting up a fish keeping site TheFishHouse. The site includes forums and general discussion of all things fishy.

My girlfriend and I once owned a small aquarium with a couple of blushing tetras, Snorkel and Twitch. It wasn't a great success. I got my first digital camera while I had the aquarium, and I totally freaked out the fish by taking a picture with the flash. Snorkel vanished behind the water filter and didn't come out for hours, and poor little twitch turned sideways and had some sort of fit. I thought I'd killed him.

I hadn't meant to use the flash, but forgot that it automatically turned itself on after I switched between view and take picture modes. This is how I learnt that the thing about fish having very short memories is untrue. After this incident, if I went anywhere near the tank with my camera the fish would immediately hide and refuse to come out for at least half an hour. Perhaps that thing about the memory only applies to goldfish... I forget.

We gave the tank and fish to our friend Paul when we left to go and live in Germany. He got a larger tank and added another fish. Sadly, the new one ended up eating Snorkel and Twitch. Paul refuses to admit he had fed our fish to this monster, maintaining to this day that they mere "vanished".

I've had been spending a little time playing with Stellarium - making a few little patches, a script for seeing an eclipse, bug reports and so on. It's really lovely software - something that I feel is a great showcase for open source software. I had seen a few posts in the Stellarium forums asking for documentation and I thought that I might be able to knock up a small user guide to help orient new users.

Six weeks later and the guide is very nearly a book! I had some contributions from other Stellarium users and it has really taken shape as a nice little project in it's own right.

More genealogy data has been uploaded into the Gates Family Genealogy pages:

Get your very own Tux The Penguin party mask! Watch through the little cut-out eye holes as the wanna-be nerds swoon when you enter the room. Amuse your friends, embarrass your family!

Click here to download the mask.

I don't know when it happened, but sometime recently it seemd google have added some more detailed satellite images to google maps UK.

Some fun links:

Millennium Dome, London Eye, Thames Barrier.

porpoisehead.net has suffered some downtime over the last few days. This was caused by a transfer from one server to another at the web hosting company which seemed to run into a few problems. Looks like we're more or less back to normal now though.

I've released a prototype version of my podcatching software, mpodder. Info here.

Perhaps it's the nice weather, perhaps it's the abundance of extreme make-over programs on TV. Whatever the reason, porpoisehead.net has got in on the act and had a face-lift. The previous PHP Nuke based site was never really satisfactory, and I finally got tired enough of it to, erm, well, nuke it and do something else.

So now we have a rather simpler site based on Drupal. After the cumbersome admin interface of PHP-Nuke, this is something of a breath of fresh air.

The old PHP-Nuke site will still be the front page for now, as I try to migrate old stories and such to the new interface.

Anyone interested in starting up a Linux User Group for Northumberland, send a message to the Northumberland LUG mailing list. Thanks to the folks at LugRadio for the mention on the show!

update 2005-06-11: Well, so far exactly NOBODY has sent a message to the mailing list. Wow it's like a digital desert up here in the distant North. There's must be some nerdy shepherd or something. Just one? Anyone?!