Yesterday at the security check at the airport , my zip-lock bag containing a 100 ml bottle of moisturiser and a tiny bottle of eye drops caused a problem. You see, the bag I had put them in was too large. It was slightly smaller than A4 when flattened out, which it almost was what with it having only two tiny items in it.

I was informed I would need to purchase a smaller bag from a machine, and transfer the two items into it before I would be allowed to walk the 10 meters to the departure lounge. After that of course I would be permitted put them back in the original bag if I wished.

I listen to a lot of podcasts. I'm not quite subscribed to enough to have something to listen to for every hour on consciousness, but I'm getting there. I could wax lyrical about he medium, but instead I would just like to list a few of my favorites.

The Stellarium team is proud to announce the release of version 0.9.1. This is primarily a bug fix and stabilization release. Apart from bug fixes, users can expect to see improved start-up times and a new sky culture (Tupi-Guarani) as well as some progress with translations and overall stability.

A big thank you to everyone who contributed - bug reporters, bug fixers, patch submitters, translators, package makers and donors.

Following the implementation of a rudimentary interactive Nebula texture editing system, I've been busy improving Stellarium's Nebula texture catalogue. The development version of Stellarium can display a great many more stars than the release version, and so it has been possible to do more accurate alignment of the nebula textures. It turns out the some of them were quite a way off...

It's quite a challenging task, even with the interactive nebular editor patch - looking at a photo of a nebula, star cluster or galaxy, which is super-imposed over a star field, and trying to work out how to scale it, rotate it and translate it so it fits with the star field.

I've long been interested in computer generated graphics, especially when the computer does all the work. Back in the 16-bit days I remember something of a craze among magazine cover disk makers for including fractal landscape generators. These were a lot of fun. One of the modern day descendants of these programs is Terragen, which is capable of generating amazingly realistic and beautiful landscape images.

Sadly, although Terragen is free for personal use, it's not open source and there is no Linux version. Enter WINE - the Windows compatibility layer which allow some Windows program to run under Linux.

While I was away on holiday, the team slipped out the new version of Stellarium. Not only that, but Stellarium was nominated project of the month at sourceforge!

I can't believe I missed out on the opportunity for surfing my ego by answering the developer questionnaire which is sent to the developers of projects of the month, and to get my mugshot on the sourceforge POTM page :(

In any case, I've been beavering away over the last few days to update the user guide, the draft version of which is now more or less complete.

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 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.